Complete Novels of E Nesbit

by Edith Nesbit

  The post-card 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.

  I am very glad some soldiers’ mothers get their boys home again.

  But if they have to die, it is a glorious death; and I hope mine will be that.

  And three cheers for the Queen, and the mothers who let their boys go, and the mothers’ sons who fight and die for old England. Hip, hip, hurrah!

  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 earache, 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 allowed to write in the book if they found out anything good that any one 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 any one 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 any one 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 flede 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.

  Oswald did not do things like these, but then he is older than his brothers. The only thing he did just about then was making a booby-trap for Mrs. Pettigrew when she had locked H. O. up in the dairy, and unfortunately it was the day she was going out in her best things, and part of the trap was a can of water. Oswald was not willingly vicious; it was but a light and thoughtless act which he had every reason to be sorry for afterwards. And he is sorry even without those reasons, because he knows it is ungentlemanly to play tricks on women.

  I remember mother telling Dora and me when we were little that you ought to be very kind and polite to servants, because they have to work very hard, and do not have so many good times as we do. I used to think about mother more at the Moat House than I did at Blackheath, especially in the garden. She was very fond of flowers, and she used to tell us about the big garden where she used to live; and, I remember, Dora and I helped her to plant seeds. But it is no use wishing. She would have liked that garden, though.

  The girls and the white mice did not do anything boldly wicked — though of course they used to borrow Mrs. Pettigrew’s needles, which made her very nasty. Needles that are borrowed might just as well be stolen. But I say no more.

  I have only told you these things to show the kind of events which occurred on the days I don’t tell you about. On the whole, we had an excellent time.

  It was on the day we had the pillow-fight that we went for the long walk. Not the Pilgrimage — that is another story. We did not mean to have a pillow-fight. It is not usual to have them after breakfast, but Oswald had come up to get his knife out of the pocket of his Etons, to cut some wire we were making rabbit snares of. It is a very good knife, with a file in it, as well as a corkscrew and other things — and he did not come down at once, because he was detained by having to make an apple-pie bed for Dicky. Dicky came up after him to see what we was up to, and when he did see he buzzed a pillow at Oswald, and the fight began. The others, hearing the noise of battle from afar, hastened to the field of action, all except Dora, who couldn’t, because of being laid up with her foot, and Daisy, because she is
a little afraid of us still, when we are all together. She thinks we are rough. This comes of having only one brother.

  Well, the fight was a very fine one. Alice backed me up, and Noël and H. O. backed Dicky, and Denny heaved a pillow or two; but he cannot shy straight, so I don’t know which side he was on.

  And just as the battle raged most fiercely, Mrs. Pettigrew came in and snatched the pillows away, and shook those of the warriors who were small enough for it. She was rough if you like. She also used language I should have thought she would be above. She said, “Drat you!” and “Drabbit you!” The last is a thing I have never heard said before. She said:

  “There’s no peace of your life with you children. Drat your antics! And that poor, dear, patient gentleman right underneath, with his headache and his handwriting: and you rampaging about over his head like young bull-calves. I wonder you haven’t more sense, a great girl like you.”

  She said this to Alice, and Alice answered gently, as we are told to do:

  “I really am awfully sorry; we forgot about the headache. Don’t be cross, Mrs. Pettigrew; we didn’t mean to; we didn’t think.”

  “You never do,” she said, and her voice, though grumpy, was no longer violent. “Why on earth you can’t take yourselves off for the day I don’t know.”

  We all said, “But may we?”

  She said, “Of course you may. Now put on your boots and go for a good long walk. And I’ll tell you what — I’ll put you up a snack, and you can have an egg to your tea to make up for missing your dinner. Now don’t go clattering about the stairs and passages, there’s good children. See if you can’t be quiet this once, and give the good gentleman a chance with his copying.”

  She went off. Her bark is worse than her bite. She does not understand anything about writing books, though. She thinks Albert’s uncle copies things out of printed books, when he is really writing new ones. I wonder how she thinks printed books get made first of all. Many servants are like this.

  She gave us the “snack” in a basket, and sixpence to buy milk with. She said any of the farms would let us have it, only most likely it would be skim. We thanked her politely, and she hurried us out of the front door as if we’d been chickens on a pansy bed.

  (I did not know till after I had left the farm gate open, and the hens had got into the garden, that these feathered bipeds display a great partiality for the young buds of plants of the genus viola, to which they are extremely destructive. I was told that by the gardener. I looked it up in the gardening book afterwards to be sure he was right. You do learn a lot of things in the country.)

  We went through the garden as far as the church, and then we rested a bit in the porch, and just looked into the basket to see what the “snack” was. It proved sausage rolls, and queen cakes, and a Lent pie in a round tin dish, and some hard-boiled eggs, and some apples. We all ate the apples at once, so as not to have to carry them about with us. The church-yard smells awfully good. It is the wild thyme that grows on the graves. This is another thing we did not know before we came into the country.

  Then the door of the church tower was ajar, and we all went up; it had always been locked before when we had tried it.

  We saw the ringer’s loft where the ends of the bell-ropes hang down with long, furry handles to them like great caterpillars, some red, and some blue and white, but we did not pull them. And then we went up to where the bells are, very big and dusty among large dirty beams; and four windows with no glass, only shutters like Venetian blinds, but they won’t pull up. There were heaps of straws and sticks on the window ledges. We think they were owls’ nests, but we did not see any owls.

  Then the tower stairs got very narrow and dark, and we went on up, and we came to a door and opened it suddenly, and it was like being hit in the face, the light was so sudden. And there we were on the top of the tower, which is flat, and people have cut their names on it, and a turret at one corner, and a low wall all round, up and down, like castle battlements. And we looked down and saw the roof of the church, and the leads, and the church-yard, and our garden, and the Moat House, and the farm, and Mrs. Simpkins’s cottage, looking very small, and other farms looking like toy things out of boxes, and we saw cornfields and meadows and pastures. A pasture is not the same thing as a meadow, whatever you may think. And we saw the tops of trees and hedges, looking like the map of the United States, and villages, and a tower that did not look very far away standing by itself on the top of a hill.

  Alice pointed to it, and said:

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s not a church,” said Noël, “because there’s no church-yard. Perhaps it’s a tower of mystery that covers the entrance to a subterranean vault with treasure in it.”

  Dicky said, “Subterranean fiddlestick!” and “A water-works, more likely.”

  Alice thought perhaps it was a ruined castle, and the rest of its crumbling walls were concealed by ivy, the growth of years.

  Oswald could not make his mind up what it was, so he said: “Let’s go and see! We may as well go there as anywhere.”

  So we got down out of the church tower and dusted ourselves, and set out.

  The Tower of Mystery showed quite plainly from the road, now that we knew where to look for it, because it was on the top of a hill. We began to walk. But the tower did not seem to get any nearer. And it was very hot.

  So we sat down in a meadow where there was a stream in the ditch and ate the “snack.” We drank the pure water from the brook out of our hands, because there was no farm to get milk at just there, and it was too much fag to look for one — and, besides, we thought we might as well save the sixpence.

  Then we started again, and still the tower looked as far off as ever. Denny began to drag his feet, though he had brought a walking-stick which none of the rest of us had, and said:

  “I wish a cart would come along. We might get a lift.”

  He knew all about getting lifts, of course, from having been in the country before. He is not quite the white mouse we took him for at first. Of course when you live in Lewisham or Blackheath you learn other things. If you asked for a lift in Lewisham, High Street, your only reply would be jeers. We sat down on a heap of stones, and decided that we would ask for a lift from the next cart, whichever way it was going. It was while we were waiting that Oswald found out about plantain seeds being good to eat.

  When the sound of wheels came we remarked with joy that the cart was going towards the Tower of Mystery. It was a cart a man was going to fetch a pig home in. Denny said:

  “I say, you might give us a lift. Will you?”

  The man who was going for the pig said:

  “What, all that little lot?” but he winked at Alice, and we saw that he meant to aid us on our way. So we climbed up, and he whipped up the horse and asked us where we were going. He was a kindly old man, with a face like a walnut shell, and white hair and beard like a jack-in-the-box.

  “We want to get to the tower,” Alice said. “Is it a ruin, or not?”

  “It ain’t no ruin,” the man said; “no fear of that! The man wot built it he left so much a year to be spent on repairing of it! Money that might have put bread in honest folks’ mouths.”

  We asked was it a church then, or not.

  “Church?” he said. “Not it. It’s more of a tombstone, from all I can make out. They do say there was a curse on him that built it, and he wasn’t to rest in earth or sea. So he’s buried half-way up the tower — if you can call it buried.”

  “Can you go up it?” Oswald asked.

  “Lord love you! yes; a fine view from the top, they say. I’ve never been up myself, though I’ve lived in sight of it, boy and man, these sixty-three years come harvest.”

  Alice asked whether you had to go past the dead and buried person to get to the top of the tower, and could you see the coffin.

  “No, no,” the man said; “that’s all hid away behind a slab of stone, that is, with reading on it. You’ve no call to be afraid, mis
sy. It’s daylight all the way up. But I wouldn’t go there after dark, so I wouldn’t. It’s always open, day and night, and they say tramps sleep there now and again. Any one who likes can sleep there, but it wouldn’t be me.”

  We thought that it would not be us either, but we wanted to go more than ever, especially when the man said:

  “My own great-uncle of the mother’s side, he was one of the masons that set up the stone slab. Before then it was thick glass, and you could see the dead man lying inside, as he’d left it in his will. He was lying there in a glass coffin with his best clothes — blue satin and silver, my uncle said, such as was all the go in his day, with his wig on, and his sword beside him, what he used to wear. My uncle said his hair had grown out from under his wig, and his beard was down to the toes of him. My uncle he always upheld that that dead man was no deader than you and me, but was in a sort of fit, a transit, I think they call it, and looked for him to waken into life again some day. But the doctor said not. It was only something done to him like Pharaoh in the Bible afore he was buried.”

  Alice whispered to Oswald that we should be late for tea, and wouldn’t it be better to go back now directly. But he said:

  “If you’re afraid, say so; and you needn’t come in anyway — but I’m going on.”

  The man who was going for the pig put us down at a gate quite near the tower — at least it looked so until we began to walk again. We thanked him, and he said:

  “Quite welcome,” and drove off.

  We were rather quiet going through the wood. What we had heard made us very anxious to see the tower — all except Alice, who would keep talking about tea, though not a greedy girl by nature. None of the others encouraged her, but Oswald thought himself that we had better be home before dark.

  As we went up the path through the wood we saw a poor wayfarer with dusty bare feet sitting on the bank.

  He stopped us and said he was a sailor, and asked for a trifle to help him to get back to his ship.