by Edith Nesbit
There, sure enough, stood a bicycle
The position was desperate. Robert exchanged a despairing look with Cyril. Anthea detached a pin from her waistband, a pin whose withdrawal left a gaping chasm between skirt and bodice, and handed it furtively to Robert—with a grimace of the darkest and deepest meaning. Robert slipped away to the road. There, sure enough, stood a bicycle—a beautiful new free-wheel. Of course Robert understood at once that if the Lamb was grown up he must have a bicycle. This had always been one of Robert’s own reasons for wishing to be grown up. He hastily began to use the pin—eleven punctures in the back tyre, seven in the front. He would have made the total twenty-two but for the rustling of the yellow hazel-leaves, which warned him of the approach of the others. He hastily leaned a hand on each wheel, and was rewarded by the “whish” of what was left of the air escaping from eighteen neat pin-holes.
“Your bike’s run down,” said Robert, wondering how he could so soon have learned to deceive.
“So it is,” said Cyril.
“It’s a puncture,” said Anthea, stooping down, and standing up again with a thorn which she had got ready for the purpose. “Look here.”
The grown-up Lamb (or Hilary, as I suppose one must now call him) fixed his pump and blew up the tyre. The punctured state of it was soon evident.
“I suppose there’s a cottage somewhere near—where one could get a pail of water?” said the Lamb.
There was; and when the number of punctures had been made manifest, it was felt to be a special blessing that the cottage provided “teas for cyclists.” It provided an odd sort of tea-and-hammy meal for the Lamb and his brothers. This was paid for out of the fifteen shillings which had been earned by Robert when he was a giant—for the Lamb, it appeared, had unfortunately no money about him. This was a great disappointment for the others; but it is a thing that will happen, even to the most grown-up of us. However, Robert had enough to eat, and that was something. Quietly but persistently the miserable four took it in turns to try to persuade the Lamb (or St. Maur) to spend the rest of the day in the woods. There was not very much of the day left by the time he had mended the eighteenth puncture. He looked up from the completed work with a sigh of relief, and suddenly put his tie straight.
“There’s a lady coming,” he said briskly—“for goodness’ sake, get out of the way. Go home—hide—vanish somehow! I can’t be seen with a pack of dirty kids.” His brothers and sisters were indeed rather dirty, because, earlier in the day, the Lamb, in his infant state, had sprinkled a good deal of garden soil over them. The grown-up Lamb’s voice was so tyrant-like, as Jane said afterwards, that they actually retreated to the back garden, and left him with his little moustache and his flannel suit to meet alone the young lady, who now came up the front garden wheeling a bicycle.
The woman of the house came out, and the young lady spoke to her—the Lamb raised his hat as she passed him—and the children could not hear what she said, though they were craning round the corner by the pig-pail and listening with all their ears. They felt it to be “perfectly fair,” as Robert said, “with that wretched Lamb in that condition.”
When the Lamb spoke in a languid voice heavy with politeness, they heard well enough.
“A puncture?” he was saying. “Can I not be of any assistance? If you could allow me—?”
There was a stifled explosion of laughter behind the pig-pail-the grown-up Lamb (otherwise Devereux) turned the tail of an angry eye in its direction.
“You’re very kind,” said the lady, looking at the Lamb. She looked rather shy, but, as the boys put it, there didn’t seem to be any nonsense about her.
“But oh,” whispered Cyril behind the pig-pail, “I should have thought he’d had enough bicycle-mending for one day—and if she only knew that really and truly he’s only a whiny-piny, silly little baby!”
“He’s not,” Anthea murmured angrily. “He’s a dear—if people only let him alone. It’s our own precious Lamb still, whatever silly idiots may turn him into—isn’t he, Pussy?”
Jane doubtfully supposed so.
Now, the Lamb—whom I must try to remember to call St. Maur—was examining the lady’s bicycle and talking to her with a very grown-up manner indeed. No one could possibly have supposed, to see and hear him, that only that very morning he had been a chubby child of two years breaking other people’s Waterbury watches. Devereux (as he ought to be called for the future) took out a gold watch when he had mended the lady’s bicycle, and all the onlookers behind the pig-pail said “Oh!”—because it seemed so unfair that the Baby, who had only that morning destroyed two cheap but honest watches, should now, in the grown-upness Cyril’s folly had raised him to, have a real gold watch—with a chain and seals!
Hilary (as I will now term him) withered his brothers and sisters with a glance, and then said to the lady—with whom he seemed to be quite friendly:
“If you will allow me, I will ride with you as far as the Cross Roads; it is getting late, and there are tramps about.”
No one will ever know what answer the young lady intended to give to this gallant offer, for, directly Anthea heard it made, she rushed out, knocking against the pig-pail, which overflowed in a turbid stream, and caught the Lamb (I suppose I ought to say Hilary) by the arm. The others followed, and in an instant the four dirty children were visible, beyond disguise.
“Don’t let him,” said Anthea; “he’s not fit to go with anyone”
“Don’t let him,” said Anthea to the lady, and she spoke with intense earnestness; “he’s not fit to go with anyone!”
“Go away, little girl!” said St. Maur (as we will now call him) in a terrible voice. “Go home at once!”
“You’d much better not have anything to do with him,” the now reckless Anthea went on. “He doesn’t know who he is. He’s something very different from what you think he is.”
“What do you mean?” asked the lady not unnaturally, while Devereux (as I must term the grown-up Lamb) tried vainly to push Anthea away. The others backed her up, and she stood solid as a rock.
“You just let him go with you,” said Anthea, “you’ll soon see what I mean! How would you like to suddenly see a poor little helpless baby spinning along downhill beside you with its feet up on a bicycle it had lost control of?”
The lady had turned rather pale.
“Who are these very dirty children?” she asked the grown-up Lamb (sometimes called St. Maur in these pages).
“I don’t know,” he lied miserably.
“Oh, Lamb! how can you?” cried Jane—“when you know perfectly well you’re our own little baby brother that we’re so fond of We’re his big brothers and sisters,” she explained, turning to the lady, who with trembling hands was now turning her bicycle towards the gate, “and we’ve got to take care of him. And we must get him home before sunset, or I don’t know whatever will become of us. You see, he’s sort of under a spell—enchanted—you know what I mean!”
Again and again the Lamb (Devereux, I mean) had tried to stop Jane’s eloquence, but Robert and Cyril held him, one by each leg, and no proper explanation was possible. The lady rode hastily away, and electrified her relatives at dinner by telling them of her escape from a family of dangerous lunatics. “The little girl’s eyes were simply those of a maniac. I can’t think how she came to be at large,” she said.
When her bicycle had whizzed away down the road, Cyril spoke gravely.
“Hilary, old chap,” he said, “you must have had a sunstroke or something. And the things you’ve been saying to that lady! Why, if we were to tell you the things you’ve said when you are yourself again, say tomorrow morning, you wouldn’t even understand them—let alone believe them! You trust to me, old chap, and come home now, and if you’re not yourself in the morning we’ll ask the milkman to ask the doctor to come.”
The poor grown-up Lamb (St. Maur was really one of his Christian names) seemed now too bewildered to resist.
“Since you seem all to be as
mad as the whole worshipful company of hatters,” he said bitterly, “I suppose I had better take you home. But you’re not to suppose I shall pass this over. I shall have something to say to you all tomorrow morning.”
“Yes, you will, my Lamb,” said Anthea under her breath, “but it won’t be at all the sort of thing you think it’s going to be.”
In her heart she could hear the pretty, soft little loving voice of the baby Lamb—so different from the affected tones of the dreadful grown-up Lamb (one of whose names was Devereux)—saying, “Me love Panty—wants to come to own Panty.”
“Oh, let’s get home, for goodness’ sake,” she said. “You shall say whatever you like in the morning—if you can,” she added in a whisper.
The grown-up Lamb struggled furiously
It was a gloomy party that went home through the soft evening. During Anthea’s remarks Robert had again made play with the pin and the bicycle tyre and the Lamb (whom they had to call St. Maur or Devereux or Hilary) seemed really at last to have had his fill of bicycle-mending. So the machine was wheeled.
The sun was just on the point of setting when they arrived at the White House. The four elder children would have liked to linger in the lane till the complete sunsetting turned the grown-up Lamb (whose Christian names I will not further weary you by repeating) into their own dear tiresome baby brother. But he, in his grown-upness, insisted on going on, and thus he was met in the front garden by Martha.
Now you remember that, as a special favour, the Psammead had arranged that the servants in the house should never notice any change brought about by the wishes of the children. Therefore Martha merely saw the usual party, with the baby Lamb, about whom she had been desperately anxious all the afternoon, trotting beside Anthea on fat baby legs, while the children, of course, still saw the grown-up Lamb (never mind what names he was christened by), and Martha rushed at him and caught him in her arms, exclaiming:
“Come to his own Martha, then—a precious poppet!”
The grown-up Lamb (whose names shall now be buried in oblivion) struggled furiously. An expression of intense horror and annoyance was seen on his face. But Martha was stronger than he. She lifted him up and carried him into the house. None of the children will ever forget that picture. The neat grey-flannel-suited grown-up young man with the green tie and the little black moustache—fortunately, he was slightly built, and not tall—struggling in the sturdy arms of Martha, who bore him away helpless, imploring him, as she went, to be a good boy now, and come and have his nice bremmilk! Fortunately, the sun set as they reached the doorstep, the bicycle disappeared, and Martha was seen to carry into the house the real live darling sleepy two-year-old Lamb. The grown-up Lamb (nameless henceforth) was gone for ever.
“For ever,” said Cyril, “because, as soon as ever the Lamb’s old enough to be bullied, we must jolly well begin to bully him, for his own sake—so that he mayn’t grow up like that.”
“You shan’t bully him,” said Anthea stoutly; “not if I can stop it.”
“We must tame him by kindness,” said Jane.
“You see,” said Robert, “if he grows up in the usual way, there’ll be plenty of time to correct him as he goes along. The awful thing today was his growing up so suddenly. There was no time to improve him at all.”
“He doesn’t want any improving,” said Anthea as the voice of the Lamb came cooing through the open door, just as she had heard it in her heart that afternoon:
“Me loves Panty—wants to come to own Panty!”
CHAPTER X
SCALPS
Probably the day would have been a greater success if Cyril had not been reading The Last of the Mohicans.ca The story was running in his head at breakfast, and as he took his third cup of tea he said dreamily, “I wish there were Red Indians in England—not big ones, you know, but little ones, just about the right size for us to fight.”
Everyone disagreed with him at the time, and no one attached any importance to the incident. But when they went down to the sand-pit to ask for a hundred pounds in two-shilling pieces with Queen Victoria’s head on, to prevent mistakes—which they had always felt to be a really reasonable wish that must turn out well—they found out that they had done it again! For the Psammead, which was very cross and sleepy, said:
“Oh, don’t bother me. You’ve had your wish.”
“I didn’t know it,” said Cyril.
“Don’t you remember yesterday?” said the Sand-fairy, still more disagreeably. “You asked me to let you have your wishes wherever you happened to be, and you wished this morning, and you’ve got it.”
“Oh, have we?” said Robert. “What is it?”
“So you’ve forgotten?” said the Psammead, beginning to burrow. “Never mind; you’ll know soon enough. And I wish you joy of it! A nice thing you’ve let yourselves in for!”
“We always do, somehow,” said Jane sadly.
And now the odd thing was that no one could remember anyone’s having wished for anything that morning. The wish about the Red Indians had not stuck in anyone’s head. It was a most anxious morning. Everyone was trying to remember what had been wished for, and no one could, and everyone kept expecting something awful to happen every minute. It was most agitating; they knew, from what the Psammead had said, that they must have wished for something more than usually undesirable, and they spent several hours in most agonizing uncertainty. It was not till nearly dinner-time that Jane tumbled over The Last of the Mohicans—which had, of course, been left face downwards on the floor—and when Anthea had picked her and the book up she suddenly said, “I know!” and sat down flat on the carpet.
“Oh, Pussy, how awful! It was Indians he wished for—Cyril—at breakfast, don’t you remember? He said, ”I wish there were Red Indians in England,“—and now there are, and they’re going about scalping people all over the country, like as not.”
“Perhaps they’re only in Northumberlandcb and Durham,”cc said Jane soothingly. It was almost impossible to believe that it could really hurt people much to be scalped so far away as that.
“Don’t you believe it!” said Anthea. “The Sammyadd said we’d let ourselves in for a nice thing. That means they’ll come here. And suppose they scalped the Lamb!”
“Perhaps the scalping would come right again at sunset,” said Jane; but she did not speak so hopefully as usual.
“Not it!” said Anthea. “The things that grow out of the wishes don’t go. Look at the fifteen shillings! Pussy, I’m going to break something, and you must let me have every penny of money you’ve got. The Indians will come here, don’t you see? That spiteful Psammead as good as said so. You see what my plan is? Come on!”
Jane did not see at all. But she followed her sister meekly into their mother’s bedroom.
Anthea lifted down the heavy water-jug—it had a pattern of storks and long grasses on it, which Anthea never forgot. She carried it into the dressing-room, and carefully emptied the water out of it into the bath. Then she took the jug back into the bedroom and dropped it on the floor.You know how a jug always breaks if you happen to drop it by accident. If you happen to drop it on purpose, it is quite different. Anthea dropped that jug three times, and it was as unbroken as ever. So at last she had to take her father’s boot-tree and break the jug with that in cold blood. It was heartless work.
Next she broke open the missionary-box with the poker. Jane told her that it was wrong, of course, but Anthea shut her lips very tight and then said:
“Don’t be silly—it’s a matter of life and death.”
There was not very much in the missionary-box—only seven-and-fourpence—but the girls between them had nearly four shillings. This made over eleven shillings, as you will easily see.
Anthea tied up the money in a corner of her pocket-handkerchief. “Come on, Jane!” she said, and ran down to the farm. She knew that the farmer was going into Rochester that afternoon. In fact it had been arranged that he was to take the four children with him. They had planne
d this in the happy hour when they believed that they were going to get that hundred pounds, in two-shilling pieces, out of the Psammead. They had arranged to pay the farmer two shillings each for the ride. Now Anthea hastily explained to him that they could not go, but would he take Martha and the Baby instead? He agreed, but he was not pleased to get only half-a-crown instead of eight shillings.
Then the girls ran home again. Anthea was agitated, but not flurried. When she came to think it over afterwards, she could not help seeing that she had acted with the most far-seeing promptitude, just like a born general. She fetched a little box from her corner drawer, and went to find Martha, who was laying the cloth and not in the best of tempers.
“Look here,” said Anthea. “I’ve broken the toilet jug in mother’s room.”
“Just like you—always up to some mischief,” said Martha, dumping down a salt-cellar with a bang.
“Don’t be cross, Martha dear,” said Anthea. “I’ve got enough money to pay for a new one—if only you’ll be a dear and go and buy it for us. Your cousins keep a china-shop, don’t they? And I would like you to get it today, in case mother comes home tomorrow. You know she said she might, perhaps.”
“But you’re all going into town yourselves,” said Martha.
“We can’t afford to, if we get the new jug,” said Anthea; “but we’ll pay for you to go, if you’ll take the Lamb. And I say, Martha, look here—I’ll give you my Liberty box, if you’ll go. Look, it’s most awfully pretty—all inlaid with real silver and ivory and ebony like King Solomon’s temple.”
“I see,” said Martha; “no, I don’t want your box, miss. What you want is to get the precious Lamb off your hands for the afternoon. Don’t you go for to think I don’t see through you!”
This was so true that Anthea longed to deny it at once. Martha had no business to know so much. But she held her tongue.
Martha set down the bread with a bang that made it jump off its trencher.
