by Edith Nesbit
He said, “I’m afraid I can’t promise that.”
Alice said, “You might; there’s a particular reason.”
He said, “What?” which was a natural remark; not rude, as it is with children.
Alice said:
“We want to give the soldiers a keepsake. I will write to ask my father. He is very well off just now. Look here — if we’re not on the wall when you come by, don’t stop; but if we are, please, please do!”
The officer pulled his mustache and looked as if he did not quite know; but at last he said “Yes,” and we were very glad, though but Alice and Oswald knew the dark but pleasant scheme at present fermenting in their youthful nuts.
The captain talked a lot to us. At last Noël said:
“I think you are like Diarmid of the Golden Collar. But I should like to see your sword out, and shining in the sun like burnished silver.”
The captain laughed and grasped the hilt of his good blade. But Oswald said, hurriedly:
“Don’t. Not yet. We sha’n’t ever have a chance like this. If you’d only show us the pursuing practice! Albert’s uncle knows it; but he only does it on an arm-chair, because he hasn’t a horse.”
And that brave and swagger captain did really do it. He rode his horse right into our gate when we opened it, and showed us all the cuts, thrusts, and guards. There are four of each kind. It was splendid. The morning sun shone on his flashing blade, and his good steed stood with all its legs far apart and stiff on the lawn. Then we opened the paddock gate and he did it again, while the horse galloped as if upon the bloody battle-field among the fierce foes of his native land, and this was far more ripping still.
Then we thanked him very much, and he went away, taking his men with him. And the guns, of course.
Then we wrote to my father, and he said “Yes,” as we knew he would, and next time the soldiers came by — but they had no guns this time, only the captive Arabs of the desert — we had the keepsakes ready in a wheelbarrow, and we were on the church-yard wall.
And the bold captain called an immediate halt.
Then the girls had the splendid honor and pleasure of giving a pipe and four whole ounces of tobacco to each soldier.
Then we shook hands with the captain and the sergeant and the corporals, and the girls kissed the captain — I can’t think why girls will kiss everybody — and we all cheered for the Queen.
It was grand. And I wish my father had been there to see how much you can do with £12 if you order the things from the Stores.
We have never seen those brave soldiers again.
I have told you all this to show you how we got so keen about soldiers, and why we sought to aid and abet the poor widow at the white cottage in her desolate and oppressedness.
Her name was Simpkins, and her cottage was just beyond the church-yard, on the other side from our house. On the different military occasions which I have remarked upon this widow woman stood at her garden gate and looked on. And after the cheering she rubbed her eyes with her apron. Alice noticed this slight but signifying action.
We feel quite sure Mrs. Simpkins liked soldiers, and so we felt friendly to her. But when we tried to talk to her she would not. She told us to go along with us, do, and not bother her. And Oswald, with his usual delicacy and good breeding, made the others do as she said.
But we were not to be thus repulsed with impunity. We made complete but cautious inquiries, and found out that the reason she cried when she saw soldiers was that she had only one son, a boy. He was twenty-two, and he had gone to the war last April. So that she thought of him when she saw the soldiers, and that was why she cried. Because when your son is at the wars you always think he is being killed. I don’t know why. A great many of them are not. If I had a son at the wars I should never think he was dead till I heard he was, and perhaps not then, considering everything.
After we had found this out we held a council.
Dora said, “We must do something for the soldier’s widowed mother.”
We all agreed, but added, “What?”
Alice said, “The gift of money might be deemed an insult by that proud, patriotic spirit. Besides, we haven’t more than eighteenpence among us.”
We had put what we had to father’s £12 to buy the baccy and pipes.
The Mouse then said, “Couldn’t we make her a flannel petticoat and leave it without a word upon her doorstep?”
But every one said, “Flannel petticoats in this weather?” so that was no go.
Noël said he would write her a poem, but Oswald had a deep, inward feeling that Mrs. Simpkins would not understand poetry. Many people do not.
H. O. said, “Why not sing ‘Rule Britannia’ under her window after she had gone to bed, like waits,” but no one else thought so.
Denny thought we might get up a subscription for her among the wealthy and affluent, but we said again that we knew money would be no balm to the haughty mother of a brave British soldier.
“What we want,” Alice said, “is something that will be a good deal of trouble to us and some good to her.”
“A little help is worth a deal of poetry,” said Denny. I should not have said that myself. Noël did look sick.
“What does she do that we can help in?” Dora asked. “Besides, she won’t let us help.”
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, over night, it seems so silly to do it when you come to waking in the dewy morn. We crept down-stairs 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 thunder-bolts, 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 groundsell 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 labor, 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 every one in Kent says “dratted” when t
hey 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 post-card that had got stuck in a magazine wrapper. Alice pulled it out. It was addressed to Mrs. Simpkins. We honorably only looked at the address, although it is allowed by the rules of honorableness to read post-cards 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 post-card 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 post-card 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 post-card (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 post-card 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 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 dare say 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 church-yard, of course, because we shouldn’t be let, but in our garden, just where it joins on to the church-yard?”
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 here.”
Then we looked out a nice flagstone in the stable-yard, and we got a cold-chisel out of the dentist’s tool-box, 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 sanguinary 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 & Country Honor 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 pease and daisies, and put them over the posts, like you see in the picture. 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 battle-field, 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 church-yard, 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 leaned 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 church-yard 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 colored, 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 dare say 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 pink on both 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.
