The E. Nesbit Megapack: 26 Classic Novels and Stories

by E. Nesbit

  The biggest then said, ‘Come on—any more of you? Come on!’

  Oswald was so enraged at this cowardly attack that he actually hit out at the big man—and he really got one in just above the belt. Then he shut his eyes, because he felt that now all was indeed up. There was a shout and a scuffle, and Oswald opened his eyes in astonishment at finding himself still whole and unimpaired. Our own tramp had artfully simulated insensibleness, to get the men off their guard, and then had suddenly got his arms round a leg each of two of the men, and pulled them to the ground, helped by Dicky, who saw his game and rushed in at the same time, exactly like Oswald would have done if he had not had his eyes shut ready to meet his doom.

  The unpleasant boys shouted, and the third man tried to help his unrespectable friends, now on their backs involved in a desperate struggle with our own tramp, who was on top of them, accompanied by Dicky. It all happened in a minute, and it was all mixed up. The dogs were growling and barking—Martha had one of the men by the trouser leg and Pincher had another; the girls were screaming like mad and the strange boys shouted and laughed (little beasts!), and then suddenly our Pig-man came round the corner, and two friends of his with him. He had gone and fetched them to take care of us if anything unpleasant occurred. It was a very thoughtful, and just like him.

  ‘Fetch the police!’ cried the Pig-man in noble tones, and H. O. started running to do it. But the scoundrels struggled from under Dicky and our tramp, shook off the dogs and some bits of trouser, and fled heavily down the road.

  Our Pig-man said, ‘Get along home!’ to the disagreeable boys, and ‘Shoo’d’ them as if they were hens, and they went. H. O. ran back when they began to go up the road, and there we were, all standing breathless in tears on the scene of the late desperate engagement. Oswald gives you his word of honour that his and Dicky’s tears were tears of pure rage. There are such things as tears of pure rage. Anyone who knows will tell you so.

  We picked up our own tramp and bathed the lump on his forehead with lemonade. The water in the zinc bath had been upset in the struggle. Then he and the Pig-man and his kind friends helped us carry our things home.

  The Pig-man advised us on the way not to try these sort of kind actions without getting a grown-up to help us. We’ve been advised this before, but now I really think we shall never try to be benevolent to the poor and needy again. At any rate not unless we know them very well first.

  We have seen our own tramp often since. The Pig-man gave him a job. He has got work to do at last. The Pig-man says he is not such a very bad chap, only he will fall asleep after the least drop of drink. We know that is his failing. We saw it at once. But it was lucky for us he fell asleep that day near our benevolent bar.

  I will not go into what my father said about it all. There was a good deal in it about minding your own business—there generally is in most of the talkings-to we get. But he gave our tramp a sovereign, and the Pig-man says he went to sleep on it for a solid week.

  CHAPTER 12

  THE CANTERBURY PILGRIMS

  The author of these few lines really does hope to goodness that no one will be such an owl as to think from the number of things we did when we were in the country, that we were wretched, neglected little children, whose grown-up relations sparkled in the bright haunts of pleasure, and whirled in the giddy what’s-its-name of fashion, while we were left to weep forsaken at home. It was nothing of the kind, and I wish you to know that my father was with us a good deal—and Albert’s uncle (who is really no uncle of ours, but only of Albert next door when we lived in Lewisham) gave up a good many of his valuable hours to us. And the father of Denny and Daisy came now and then, and other people, quite as many as we wished to see. And we had some very decent times with them; and enjoyed ourselves very much indeed, thank you. In some ways the good times you have with grown-ups are better than the ones you have by yourselves. At any rate they are safer. It is almost impossible, then, to do anything fatal without being pulled up short by a grown-up ere yet the deed is done. And, if you are careful, anything that goes wrong can be looked on as the grown-up’s fault. But these secure pleasures are not so interesting to tell about as the things you do when there is no one to stop you on the edge of the rash act.

  It is curious, too, that many of our most interesting games happened when grown-ups were far away. For instance when we were pilgrims.

  It was just after the business of the Benevolent Bar, and it was a wet day. It is not easy to amuse yourself indoors on a wet day as older people seem to think, especially when you are far removed from your own home, and haven’t got all your own books and things. The girls were playing Halma—which is a beastly game—Noël was writing poetry, H. O. was singing ‘I don’t know what to do’ to the tune of ‘Canaan’s happy shore.’ It goes like this, and is very tiresome to listen to—

  ‘I don’t know what to do—oo—oo—oo!

  I don’t know what to do—oo—oo!

  It is a beastly rainy day

  And I don’t know what to do.’

  The rest of us were trying to make him shut up. We put a carpet bag over his head, but he went on inside it; and then we sat on him, but he sang under us; we held him upside down and made him crawl head first under the sofa, but when, even there, he kept it up, we saw that nothing short of violence would induce him to silence, so we let him go. And then he said we had hurt him, and we said we were only in fun, and he said if we were he wasn’t, and ill feeling might have grown up even out of a playful brotherly act like ours had been, only Alice chucked the Halma and said—

  ‘Let dogs delight. Come on—let’s play something.’

  Then Dora said, ‘Yes, but look here. Now we’re together I do want to say something. What about the Wouldbegoods Society?’

  Many of us groaned, and one said, ‘Hear! hear!’ I will not say which one, but it was not Oswald.

  ‘No, but really,’ Dora said, ‘I don’t want to be preachy—but you know we did say we’d try to be good. And it says in a book I was reading only yesterday that not being naughty is not enough. You must be good. And we’ve hardly done anything. The Golden Deed book’s almost empty.’

  ‘Couldn’t we have a book of leaden deeds?’ said Noël, coming out of his poetry, ‘then there’d be plenty for Alice to write about if she wants to, or brass or zinc or aluminium deeds? We shan’t ever fill the book with golden ones.’

  H. O. had rolled himself in the red tablecloth and said Noël was only advising us to be naughty, and again peace waved in the balance. But Alice said, ‘Oh, H. O., Don’t—he didn’t mean that; but really and truly, I wish wrong things weren’t so interesting. You begin to do a noble act, and then it gets so exciting, and before you know where you are you are doing something wrong as hard as you can lick.’

  ‘And enjoying it too’ Dick said.

  ‘It’s very curious,’ Denny said, ‘but you don’t seem to be able to be certain inside yourself whether what you’re doing is right if you happen to like doing it, but if you don’t like doing it you know quite well. I only thought of that just now. I wish Noël would make a poem about it.’

  ‘I am,’ Noël said; ‘it began about a crocodile but it is finishing itself up quite different from what I meant it to at first. Just wait a minute.’

  He wrote very hard while his kind brothers and sisters and his little friends waited the minute he had said, and then he read:

  ‘The crocodile is very wise,

  He lives in the Nile with little eyes,

  He eats the hippopotamus too,

  And if he could he would eat up you.

  ‘The lovely woods and starry skies

  He looks upon with glad surprise!

  He sees the riches of the east,

  And the tiger and lion, kings of beast.

  ‘So let all be good and beware

  Of sa
ying shan’t and won’t and don’t care;

  For doing wrong is easier far

  Than any of the right things I know about are.

  And I couldn’t make it king of beasts

  Because of it not rhyming with east,

  So I put the s off beasts onto king.

  It comes even in the end.’

  We all said it was a very nice piece of poetry. Noël gets really ill if you don’t like what he writes, and then he said, ‘If it’s trying that’s wanted, I don’t care how hard we try to be good, but we may as well do it some nice way. Let’s be Pilgrim’s Progress, like I wanted to at first.’

  And we were all beginning to say we didn’t want to, when suddenly Dora said, ‘Oh, look here! I know. We’ll be the Canterbury Pilgrims. People used to go pilgrimages to make themselves good.’

  ‘With peas in their shoes,’ the Dentist said. ‘It’s in a piece of poetry—only the man boiled his peas—which is quite unfair.’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ said H. O., ‘and cocked hats.’

  ‘Not cocked—cockled’—it was Alice who said this. ‘And they had staffs and scrips, and they told each other tales. We might as well.’

  Oswald and Dora had been reading about the Canterbury Pilgrims in a book called A Short History of the English People. It is not at all short really—three fat volumes—but it has jolly good pictures. It was written by a gentleman named Green. So Oswald said—

  ‘All right. I’ll be the Knight.’

  ‘I’ll be the wife of Bath,’ Dora said. ‘What will you be, Dicky?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t care, I’ll be Mr Bath if you like.’

  ‘We don’t know much about the people,’ Alice said. ‘How many were there?’

  ‘Thirty,’ Oswald replied, ‘but we needn’t be all of them. There’s a Nun-Priest.’

  ‘Is that a man or a woman?’

  Oswald said he could not be sure by the picture, but Alice and Noël could be it between them. So that was settled. Then we got the book and looked at the dresses to see if we could make up dresses for the parts. At first we thought we would, because it would be something to do, and it was a very wet day; but they looked difficult, especially the Miller’s. Denny wanted to be the Miller, but in the end he was the Doctor, because it was next door to Dentist, which is what we call him for short. Daisy was to be the Prioress—because she is good, and has ‘a soft little red mouth,’ and H. O. would be the Manciple (I don’t know what that is), because the picture of him is bigger than most of the others, and he said Manciple was a nice portmanteau word—half mandarin and half disciple.

  ‘Let’s get the easiest parts of the dresses ready first.’ Alice said—‘the pilgrims’ staffs and hats and the cockles.’

  So Oswald and Dicky braved the fury of the elements and went into the wood beyond the orchard to cut ash-sticks. We got eight jolly good long ones. Then we took them home, and the girls bothered till we changed our clothes, which were indeed sopping with the elements we had faced.

  Then we peeled the sticks. They were nice and white at first, but they soon got dirty when we carried them. It is a curious thing: however often you wash your hands they always seem to come off on anything white. And we nailed paper rosettes to the tops of them. That was the nearest we could get to cockle-shells.

  ‘And we may as well have them there as on our hats,’ Alice said. ‘And let’s call each other by our right names today, just to get into it. Don’t you think so, Knight?’

  ‘Yea, Nun-Priest,’ Oswald was replying, but Noël said she was only half the Nun-Priest, and again a threat of unpleasantness darkened the air. But Alice said—

  ‘Don’t be a piggy-wiggy, Noël, dear; you can have it all, I don’t want it. I’ll just be a plain pilgrim, or Henry who killed Becket.’

  So she was called the Plain Pilgrim, and she did not mind.

  We thought of cocked hats, but they are warm to wear, and the big garden hats that make you look like pictures on the covers of plantation songs did beautifully. We put cockle-shells on them. Sandals we did try, with pieces of oil-cloth cut the shape of soles and fastened with tape, but the dust gets into your toes so, and we decided boots were better for such a long walk. Some of the pilgrims who were very earnest decided to tie their boots with white tape crossed outside to pretend sandals. Denny was one of these earnest palmers. As for dresses, there was no time to make them properly, and at first we thought of nightgowns; but we decided not to, in case people in Canterbury were not used to that sort of pilgrim nowadays. We made up our minds to go as we were—or as we might happen to be next day.

  You will be ready to believe we hoped next day would be fine. It was.

  Fair was the morn when the pilgrims arose and went down to breakfast. Albert’s uncle had had brekker early and was hard at work in his study. We heard his quill pen squeaking when we listened at the door. It is not wrong to listen at doors when there is only one person inside, because nobody would tell itself secrets aloud when it was alone.

  We got lunch from the housekeeper, Mrs Pettigrew. She seems almost to like us all to go out and take our lunch with us. Though I should think it must be very dull for her all alone. I remember, though, that Eliza, our late general at Lewisham, was just the same. We took the dear dogs of course. Since the Tower of Mystery happened we are not allowed to go anywhere without the escort of these faithful friends of man. We did not take Martha, because bull-dogs do not like walks. Remember this if you ever have one of those valuable animals.

  When we were all ready, with our big hats and cockle-shells, and our staves and our tape sandals, the pilgrims looked very nice.

  ‘Only we haven’t any scrips,’ Dora said. ‘What is a scrip?’

  ‘I think it’s something to read. A roll of parchment or something.’

  So we had old newspapers rolled up, and carried them in our hands. We took the Globe and the Westminster Gazette because they are pink and green. The Dentist wore his white sandshoes, sandalled with black tape, and bare legs. They really looked almost as good as bare feet.

  ‘We ought to have peas in our shoes,’ he said. But we did not think so. We knew what a very little stone in your boot will do, let alone peas.

  Of course we knew the way to go to Canterbury, because the old Pilgrims’ Road runs just above our house. It is a very pretty road, narrow, and often shady. It is nice for walking, but carts do not like it because it is rough and rutty; so there is grass growing in patches on it.

  I have said that it was a fine day, which means that it was not raining, but the sun did not shine all the time.

  ‘’Tis well, O Knight,’ said Alice, ‘that the orb of day shines not in undi—what’s-its-name?—splendour.’

  ‘Thou sayest sooth, Plain Pilgrim,’ replied Oswald. ‘’Tis jolly warm even as it is.’

  ‘I wish I wasn’t two people,’ Noël said, ‘it seems to make me hotter. I think I’ll be a Reeve or something.’

  But we would not let him, and we explained that if he hadn’t been so beastly particular Alice would have been half of him, and he had only himself to thank if being all of a Nun-Priest made him hot.

  But it was warm certainly, and it was some time since we’d gone so far in boots. Yet when H. O. complained we did our duty as pilgrims and made him shut up. He did as soon as Alice said that about whining and grizzling being below the dignity of a Manciple.

  It was so warm that the Prioress and the wife of Bath gave up walking with their arms round each other in their usual silly way (Albert’s uncle calls it Laura Matildaing), and the Doctor and Mr Bath had to take their jackets off and carry them.

  I am sure if an artist or a photographer, or any person who liked pilgrims, had seen us he would have been very pleased. The paper cockle-shells were first-rate, but it was awkward having them on the top of the staffs, because they got in
your way when you wanted the staff to use as a walking-stick.

  We stepped out like a man all of us, and kept it up as well as we could in book-talk, and at first all was merry as a dinner-bell; but presently Oswald, who was the ‘very perfect gentle knight,’ could not help noticing that one of us was growing very silent and rather pale, like people are when they have eaten something that disagrees with them before they are quite sure of the fell truth.

  So he said, ‘What’s up, Dentist, old man?’ quite kindly and like a perfect knight, though, of course, he was annoyed with Denny. It is sickening when people turn pale in the middle of a game and everything is spoiled, and you have to go home, and tell the spoiler how sorry you are that he is knocked up, and pretend not to mind about the game being spoiled.

  Denny said, ‘Nothing,’ but Oswald knew better.

  Then Alice said, ‘Let’s rest a bit, Oswald, it is hot.’

  ‘Sir Oswald, if you please, Plain Pilgrim,’ returned her brother dignifiedly. ‘Remember I’m a knight.’

  So then we sat down and had lunch, and Denny looked better. We played adverbs, and twenty questions, and apprenticing your son, for a bit in the shade, and then Dicky said it was time to set sail if we meant to make the port of Canterbury that night. Of course, pilgrims reck not of ports, but Dicky never does play the game thoughtfully.

  We went on. I believe we should have got to Canterbury all right and quite early, only Denny got paler and paler, and presently Oswald saw, beyond any doubt, that he was beginning to walk lame.

  ‘Shoes hurt you, Dentist?’ he said, still with kind striving cheerfulness.

  ‘Not much—it’s all right,’ returned the other.

  So on we went—but we were all a bit tired now—and the sun was hotter and hotter; the clouds had gone away. We had to begin to sing to keep up our spirits. We sang ‘The British Grenadiers’ and ‘John Brown’s Body,’ which is grand to march to, and a lot of others. We were just starting on ‘Tramp, tramp, tramp, the boys are marching,’ when Denny stopped short. He stood first on one foot and then on the other, and suddenly screwed up his face and put his knuckles in his eyes and sat down on a heap of stones by the roadside. When we pulled his hands down he was actually crying. The author does not wish to say it is babyish to cry.