The E. Nesbit Megapack: 26 Classic Novels and Stories

by E. Nesbit

  H. O. said, ‘She does nothing but work in the garden. At least if she does anything inside you can’t see it, because she keeps the door shut.’

  Then at once we saw. And we agreed to get up the very next day, ere yet the rosy dawn had flushed the east, and have a go at Mrs Simpkins’s garden.

  We got up. We really did. But too often when you mean to, overnight, it seems so silly to do it when you come to waking in the dewy morn. We crept downstairs with our boots in our hands. Denny is rather unlucky, though a most careful boy. It was he who dropped his boot, and it went blundering down the stairs, echoing like thunderbolts, and waking up Albert’s uncle. But when we explained to him that we were going to do some gardening he let us, and went back to bed.

  Everything is very pretty and different in the early morning, before people are up. I have been told this is because the shadows go a different way from what they do in the awake part of the day. But I don’t know. Noël says the fairies have just finished tidying up then. Anyhow it all feels quite otherwise.

  We put on our boots in the porch, and we got our gardening tools and we went down to the white cottage. It is a nice cottage, with a thatched roof, like in the drawing copies you get at girls’ schools, and you do the thatch—if you can—with a B.B. pencil. If you cannot, you just leave it. It looks just as well, somehow, when it is mounted and framed.

  We looked at the garden. It was very neat. Only one patch was coming up thick with weeds. I could see groundsel and chickweed, and others that I did not know. We set to work with a will. We used all our tools—spades, forks, hoes, and rakes—and Dora worked with the trowel, sitting down, because her foot was hurt. We cleared the weedy patch beautifully, scraping off all the nasty weeds and leaving the nice clean brown dirt. We worked as hard as ever we could. And we were happy, because it was unselfish toil, and no one thought then of putting it in the Book of Golden Deeds, where we had agreed to write down our virtuous actions and the good doings of each other, when we happen to notice them.

  We had just done, and we were looking at the beautiful production of our honest labour, when the cottage door burst open, and the soldier’s widowed mother came out like a wild tornado, and her eyes looked like upas trees—death to the beholder.

  ‘You wicked, meddlesome, nasty children!’ she said, ain’t you got enough of your own good ground to runch up and spoil, but you must come into my little lot?’

  Some of us were deeply alarmed, but we stood firm.

  ‘We have only been weeding your garden,’ Dora said; ‘we wanted to do something to help you.’

  ‘Dratted little busybodies,’ she said. It was indeed hard, but everyone in Kent says ‘dratted’ when they are cross. ‘It’s my turnips,’ she went on, ‘you’ve hoed up, and my cabbages. My turnips that my boy sowed afore he went. There, get along with you do, afore I come at you with my broom-handle.’

  She did come at us with her broom-handle as she spoke, and even the boldest turned and fled. Oswald was even the boldest. ‘They looked like weeds right enough,’ he said.

  And Dicky said, ‘It all comes of trying to do golden deeds.’ This was when we were out in the road.

  As we went along, in a silence full of gloomy remorse, we met the postman. He said—

  ‘Here’s the letters for the Moat,’ and passed on hastily. He was a bit late.

  When we came to look through the letters, which were nearly all for Albert’s uncle, we found there was a postcard that had got stuck in a magazine wrapper. Alice pulled it out. It was addressed to Mrs Simpkins. We honourably only looked at the address, although it is allowed by the rules of honourableness to read postcards that come to your house if you like, even if they are not for you.

  After a heated discussion, Alice and Oswald said they were not afraid, whoever was, and they retraced their steps, Alice holding the postcard right way up, so that we should not look at the lettery part of it, but only the address.

  With quickly-beating heart, but outwardly unmoved, they walked up to the white cottage door.

  It opened with a bang when we knocked.

  ‘Well?’ Mrs Simpkins said, and I think she said it what people in books call ‘sourly.’

  Oswald said, ‘We are very, very sorry we spoiled your turnips, and we will ask my father to try and make it up to you some other way.’

  She muttered something about not wanting to be beholden to anybody.

  ‘We came back,’ Oswald went on, with his always unruffled politeness, ‘because the postman gave us a postcard in mistake with our letters, and it is addressed to you.’

  ‘We haven’t read it,’ Alice said quickly. I think she needn’t have said that. Of course we hadn’t. But perhaps girls know better than we do what women are likely to think you capable of.

  The soldier’s mother took the postcard (she snatched it really, but ‘took’ is a kinder word, considering everything) and she looked at the address a long time. Then she turned it over and read what was on the back. Then she drew her breath in as far as it would go, and caught hold of the door-post. Her face got awful. It was like the wax face of a dead king I saw once at Madame Tussaud’s.

  Alice understood. She caught hold of the soldier’s mother’s hand and said—

  ‘Oh, no—it’s not your boy Bill!’

  And the woman said nothing, but shoved the postcard into Alice’s hand, and we both read it—and it was her boy Bill.

  Alice gave her back the card. She had held on to the woman’s hand all the time, and now she squeezed the hand, and held it against her face. But she could not say a word because she was crying so. The soldier’s mother took the card again and she pushed Alice away, but it was not an unkind push, and she went in and shut the door; and as Alice and Oswald went down the road Oswald looked back, and one of the windows of the cottage had a white blind. Afterwards the other windows had too. There were no blinds really to the cottage. It was aprons and things she had pinned up.

  Alice cried most of the morning, and so did the other girls. We wanted to do something for the soldier’s mother, but you can do nothing when people’s sons are shot. It is the most dreadful thing to want to do something for people who are unhappy, and not to know what to do.

  It was Noël who thought of what we could do at last.

  He said, ‘I suppose they don’t put up tombstones to soldiers when they die in war. But there—I mean Oswald said, ‘Of course not.’

  Noël said, ‘I daresay you’ll think it’s silly, but I don’t care. Don’t you think she’d like it, if we put one up to him? Not in the churchyard, of course, because we shouldn’t be let, but in our garden, just where it joins on to the churchyard?’

  And we all thought it was a first-rate idea.

  This is what we meant to put on the tombstone:

  ‘Here lies

  BILL SIMPKINS

  Who died fighting for Queen

  and Country.’

  ‘A faithful son,

  A son so dear,

  A soldier brave

  Lies buried here.’

  Then we remembered that poor brave Bill was really buried far away in the Southern hemisphere, if at all. So we altered it to—

  ‘A soldier brave

  We weep for him here.’

  Then we looked out a nice flagstone in the stable-yard, and we got a cold chisel out of the Dentist’s toolbox, and began.

  But stone-cutting is difficult and dangerous work.

  Oswald went at it a bit, but he chipped his thumb, and it bled so he had to chuck it. Then Dicky tried, and then Denny, but Dicky hammered his finger, and Denny took all day over every stroke, so that by tea-time we had only done the H, and about half the E—and the E was awfully crooked. Oswald chipped his thumb over the H.

  We looked at it the next morning, and even the most s
anguinary of us saw that it was a hopeless task.

  Then Denny said, ‘Why not wood and paint?’ and he showed us how. We got a board and two stumps from the carpenter’s in the village, and we painted it all white, and when that was dry Denny did the words on it.

  It was something like this:

  ‘IN MEMORY OF

  BILL SIMPKINS

  DEAD FOR QUEEN AND COUNTRY.

  HONOUR TO HIS NAME AND ALL

  OTHER BRAVE SOLDIERS.’

  We could not get in what we meant to at first, so we had to give up the poetry.

  We fixed it up when it was dry. We had to dig jolly deep to get the posts to stand up, but the gardener helped us.

  Then the girls made wreaths of white flowers, roses and Canterbury bells, and lilies and pinks, and sweet-peas and daisies, and put them over the posts. And I think if Bill Simpkins had known how sorry we were, he would have been glad. Oswald only hopes if he falls on the wild battlefield, which is his highest ambition, that somebody will be as sorry about him as he was about Bill, that’s all!

  When all was done, and what flowers there were over from the wreaths scattered under the tombstone between the posts, we wrote a letter to Mrs Simpkins, and said—

  DEAR MRS SIMPKINS—

  We are very, very sorry about the turnips and things, and we beg your pardon humbly. We have put up a tombstone to your brave son.

  And we signed our names. Alice took the letter.

  The soldier’s mother read it, and said something about our oughting to know better than to make fun of people’s troubles with our tombstones and tomfoolery.

  Alice told me she could not help crying.

  She said—

  ‘It’s not! it’s not! Dear, dear Mrs Simpkins, do come with me and see! You don’t know how sorry we are about Bill. Do come and see.

  We can go through the churchyard, and the others have all gone in, so as to leave it quiet for you. Do come.’

  And Mrs Simpkins did. And when she read what we had put up, and Alice told her the verse we had not had room for, she leant against the wall by the grave—I mean the tombstone—and Alice hugged her, and they both cried bitterly. The poor soldier’s mother was very, very pleased, and she forgave us about the turnips, and we were friends after that, but she always liked Alice the best. A great many people do, somehow.

  After that we used to put fresh flowers every day on Bill’s tombstone, and I do believe his mother was pleased, though she got us to move it away from the churchyard edge and put it in a corner of our garden under a laburnum, where people could not see it from the church. But you could from the road, though I think she thought you couldn’t. She came every day to look at the new wreaths. When the white flowers gave out we put coloured, and she liked it just as well.

  About a fortnight after the erecting of the tombstone the girls were putting fresh wreaths on it when a soldier in a red coat came down the road, and he stopped and looked at us. He walked with a stick, and he had a bundle in a blue cotton handkerchief, and one arm in a sling.

  And he looked again, and he came nearer, and he leaned on the wall, so that he could read the black printing on the white paint.

  And he grinned all over his face, and he said—

  ‘Well, I am blessed!’

  And he read it all out in a sort of half whisper, and when he came to the end, where it says, ‘and all such brave soldiers,’ he said—

  ‘Well, I really am!’ I suppose he meant he really was blessed. Oswald thought it was like the soldier’s cheek, so he said—

  ‘I daresay you aren’t so very blessed as you think. What’s it to do with you, anyway, eh, Tommy?’

  Of course Oswald knew from Kipling that an infantry soldier is called that. The soldier said—

  ‘Tommy yourself, young man. That’s me!’ and he pointed to the tombstone.

  We stood rooted to the spot. Alice spoke first.

  ‘Then you’re Bill, and you’re not dead,’ she said. ‘Oh, Bill, I am so glad! Do let me tell your mother.’

  She started running, and so did we all. Bill had to go slowly because of his leg, but I tell you he went as fast as ever he could.

  We all hammered at the soldier’s mother’s door, and shouted—

  ‘Come out! come out!’ and when she opened the door we were going to speak, but she pushed us away, and went tearing down the garden path like winking. I never saw a grown-up woman run like it, because she saw Bill coming.

  She met him at the gate, running right into him, and caught hold of him, and she cried much more than when she thought he was dead.

  And we all shook his hand and said how glad we were.

  The soldier’s mother kept hold of him with both hands, and I couldn’t help looking at her face. It was like wax that had been painted on both pink cheeks, and the eyes shining like candles. And when we had all said how glad we were, she said—

  ‘Thank the dear Lord for His mercies,’ and she took her boy Bill into the cottage and shut the door.

  We went home and chopped up the tombstone with the wood-axe and had a blazing big bonfire, and cheered till we could hardly speak.

  The postcard was a mistake; he was only missing. There was a pipe and a whole pound of tobacco left over from our keepsake to the other soldiers. We gave it to Bill. Father is going to have him for under-gardener when his wounds get well. He’ll always be a bit lame, so he cannot fight any more.

  CHAPTER 4

  THE TOWER OF MYSTERY

  It was very rough on Dora having her foot bad, but we took it in turns to stay in with her, and she was very decent about it. Daisy was most with her. I do not dislike Daisy, but I wish she had been taught how to play. Because Dora is rather like that naturally, and sometimes I have thought that Daisy makes her worse.

  I talked to Albert’s uncle about it one day, when the others had gone to church, and I did not go because of ear-ache, and he said it came from reading the wrong sort of books partly—she has read Ministering Children, and Anna Ross, or The Orphan of Waterloo, and Ready Work for Willing Hands, and Elsie, or Like a Little Candle, and even a horrid little blue book about the something or other of Little Sins. After this conversation Oswald took care she had plenty of the right sort of books to read, and he was surprised and pleased when she got up early one morning to finish Monte Cristo. Oswald felt that he was really being useful to a suffering fellow-creature when he gave Daisy books that were not all about being good.

  A few days after Dora was laid up, Alice called a council of the Wouldbegoods, and Oswald and Dicky attended with darkly-clouded brows. Alice had the minute-book, which was an exercise-book that had not much written in it. She had begun at the other end. I hate doing that myself, because there is so little room at the top compared with right way up.

  Dora and a sofa had been carried out on to the lawn, and we were on the grass. It was very hot and dry. We had sherbet. Alice read:

  ‘“Society of the Wouldbegoods.

  ‘“We have not done much. Dicky mended a window, and we got the milk-pan out of the moat that dropped through where he mended it. Dora, Oswald, Dicky and me got upset in the moat. This was not goodness. Dora’s foot was hurt. We hope to do better next time.”’

  Then came Noël’s poem:

  ‘We are the Wouldbegoods Society,

  We are not good yet, but we mean to try,

  And if we try, and if we don’t succeed,

  It must mean we are very bad indeed.’

  This sounded so much righter than Noël’s poetry generally does, that Oswald said so, and Noël explained that Denny had helped him.

  ‘He seems to know the right length for lines of poetry. I suppose it comes of learning so much at school,’ Noël said.

  Then Oswald proposed that anybody should be all
owed to write in the book if they found out anything good that anyone else had done, but not things that were public acts; and nobody was to write about themselves, or anything other people told them, only what they found out.

  After a brief jaw the others agreed, and Oswald felt, not for the first time in his young life, that he would have made a good diplomatic hero to carry despatches and outwit the other side. For now he had put it out of the minute-book’s power to be the kind of thing readers of Ministering Children would have wished.

  ‘And if anyone tells other people any good thing he’s done he is to go to Coventry for the rest of the day.’

  And Denny remarked, ‘We shall do good by stealth, and blush to find it shame.’

  After that nothing was written in the book for some time. I looked about, and so did the others, but I never caught anyone in the act of doing anything extra; though several of the others have told me since of things they did at this time, and really wondered nobody had noticed.

  I think I said before that when you tell a story you cannot tell everything. It would be silly to do it. Because ordinary kinds of play are dull to read about; and the only other thing is meals, and to dwell on what you eat is greedy and not like a hero at all. A hero is always contented with a venison pasty and a horn of sack. All the same, the meals were very interesting; with things you do not get at home—Lent pies with custard and currants in them, sausage rolls and fiede cakes, and raisin cakes and apple turnovers, and honeycomb and syllabubs, besides as much new milk as you cared about, and cream now and then, and cheese always on the table for tea. Father told Mrs Pettigrew to get what meals she liked, and she got these strange but attractive foods.

  In a story about Wouldbegoods it is not proper to tell of times when only some of us were naughty, so I will pass lightly over the time when Noël got up the kitchen chimney and brought three bricks and an old starling’s nest and about a ton of soot down with him when he fell. They never use the big chimney in the summer, but cook in the wash-house. Nor do I wish to dwell on what H. O. did when he went into the dairy. I do not know what his motive was. But Mrs Pettigrew said she knew; and she locked him in, and said if it was cream he wanted he should have enough, and she wouldn’t let him out till tea-time. The cat had also got into the dairy for some reason of her own, and when H. O. was tired of whatever he went in for he poured all the milk into the churn and tried to teach the cat to swim in it. He must have been desperate. The cat did not even try to learn, and H. O. had the scars on his hands for weeks. I do not wish to tell tales of H. O., for he is very young, and whatever he does he always catches it for; but I will just allude to our being told not to eat the greengages in the garden. And we did not. And whatever H. O. did was Noël’s fault—for Noël told H. O. that greengages would grow again all right if you did not bite as far as the stone, just as wounds are not mortal except when you are pierced through the heart. So the two of them bit bites out of every greengage they could reach. And of course the pieces did not grow again.