by Edith Nesbit
In an instant the five were on us. Dicky and I got in some good ones, and though Oswald cannot approve of my sister being in a street fight, he must own she was very quick and useful in pulling ears and twisting arms and slapping and pinching. But she had quite forgotten how to hit out from the shoulder like I have often shown her.
The battle raged, and Alice often turned the tide of it by a well-timed shove or nip. The aged Eastern leaned against the wall, panting and holding his blue heart with his yellow hand. Oswald had got a boy down, and was kneeling on him, and Alice was trying to pull off two other boys who had fallen on top of the fray, while Dicky was letting the fifth have it, when there was a flash of blue and another Chinaman dashed into the tournament. Fortunately this one was not old, and with a few well-directed, if foreign looking, blows he finished the work so ably begun by the brave Bastables, and next moment the five loathsome and youthful aggressors were bolting down the passage. Oswald and Dicky were trying to get their breath and find out exactly where they were hurt and how much, and Alice had burst out crying and was howling as though she would never stop. That is the worst of girls — they never can keep anything up. Any brave act they may suddenly do, when for a moment they forget that they have not the honour to be boys, is almost instantly made into contemptibility by a sudden attack of crybabyishness. But I will say no more: for she did strike the first blow, after all, and it did turn out that the boys had scratched her wrist and kicked her shins. These things make girls cry.
The venerable stranger from distant shores said a good deal to the other in what I suppose was the language used in China. It all sounded like “hung” and “li” and “chi,” and then the other turned to us and said —
“Nicee lilly girlee, same piecee flowelee, you takee my head to walkee on. This is alle samee my father first chop ancestor. Dirty white devils makee him hurt. You come alongee fightee ploper. Me likee you welly muchee.”
Alice was crying too much to answer, especially as she could not find her handkerchief. I gave her mine, and then she was able to say that she did not want to walk on anybody’s head, and she wanted to go home.
“This not nicee place for lillee whitee girlee,” said the young Chinaman. His pigtail was thicker than his father’s and black right up to the top. The old man’s was grey at the beginning, but lower down it was black, because that part of it was not hair at all, but black threads and ribbons and odds and ends of trimmings, and towards the end both pigtails were greenish.
“Me lun backee takee him safee,” the younger of the Eastern adventurers went on, pointing to his father. “Then me makee walkee all alonk you, takee you back same placee you comee from. Little white devils waitee for you on ce load. You comee with? Not? Lillee girlee not cly. John givee her one piecee pletty-pletty. Come makee talkee with the House Lady.”
I believe this is about what he said, and we understood that he wanted us to come and see his mother, and that he would give Alice something pretty, and then see us safe out of the horrible brown-grey country.
So we agreed to go with them, for we knew those five boys would be waiting for us on the way back, most likely with strong reinforcements. Alice stopped crying the minute she could — I must say she is better than Dora in that way — and we followed the Chinamen, who walked in single file like Indians, so we did the same, and talked to each other over our shoulders. Our grateful Oriental friends led us through a good many streets, and suddenly opened a door with a key, pulled us in, and shut the door. Dick thought of the kidnapping of Florence Dombey and good Mrs. Brown, but Oswald had no such unnoble thoughts.
ON THE SIDEBOARD WAS A BLUEY-WHITE CROCKERY IMAGE.
The room was small, and very, very odd. It was very dirty too, but perhaps it is not polite to say that. There was a sort of sideboard at one end of the room, with an embroidered dirty cloth on it, and on the cloth a bluey-white crockery image over a foot high. It was very fat and army and leggy, and I think it was an idol. The minute we got inside the young man lighted little brown sticks, and set them to burn in front of it. I suppose it was incense. There was a sort of long, wide, low sofa, without any arms or legs, and a table that was like a box, with another box in front of it for you to sit down on when you worked, and on the table were all sorts of tiny little tools — awls and brads they looked like — and pipe-stems and broken bowls of pipes and mouthpieces, for our rescued Chinaman was a pipe-mender by trade. There wasn’t much else in the room except the smell, and that seemed to fill it choke-full. The smell seemed to have all sorts of things in it — glue and gunpowder, and white garden lilies and burnt fat, and it was not so easy to breathe as plain air.
Then a Chinese lady came in. She had green-grey trousers, shiny like varnish, and a blue gown, and her hair was pulled back very tight, and twisted into a little knob at the back.
She wanted to go down on the floor before Alice, but we wouldn’t let her. Then she said a great many things that we feel sure were very nice, only they were in Chinese, so we could not tell what they were.
And the Chinaman said that his mother also wanted Alice to walk on her head — not Alice’s own, of course, but the mother’s.
I wished we had stayed longer, and tried harder to understand what they said, because it was an adventure, take it how you like, that we’re not likely to look upon the like of again. Only we were too flustered to see this.
We said, “Don’t mention it,” and things like that; and when Dicky said, “I think we ought to be going,” Oswald said so too.
Then they all began talking Chinese like mad, and the Chinese lady came back and suddenly gave Alice a parrot.
It was red and green, with a very long tail, and as tame as any pet fawn I ever read about. It walked up her arm and round her neck, and stroked her face with its beak. And it did not bite Oswald or Alice, or even Dicky, though they could not be sure at first that it was not going to.
We said all the polite things we could, and the old lady made thousands of hurried Chinese replies, and repeated many times, “All litey, John,” which seemed to be all the English she knew.
We never had so much fuss made over us in all our lives. I think it was that that upset our calmness, and seemed to put us into a sort of silly dream that made us not see what idiots we were to hurry off from scenes we should never again behold. So we went. And the youthful Celestial saw us safely to the top of Bullamy’s Stairs, and left us there with the parrot and floods of words that seemed all to end in double “e.”
We wanted to show him to the others, but he would not come, so we rejoined our anxious relations without him.
The scene of rejoinder was painful, at first because they were most frightfully sick at us having been such an age away; but when we let them look at the parrot, and told them about the fight, they agreed that it was not our fault, and we really had been unavoidably detained.
But Dora said, “Well, you may say I’m always preaching, but I don’t think Father would like Alice to be fighting street boys in Millwall.”
“I suppose you’d have run away and let the old man be killed,” said Dicky, and peace was not restored till we were nearly at Greenwich again.
We took the tram to Greenwich Station, and then we took a cab home (and well worth the money, which was all we now had got, except fourpence-halfpenny), for we were all dog-tired.
And dog-tired reminds me that we hadn’t found Pincher, in spite of all our trouble.
Miss Blake, who is our housekeeper, was angrier than I have ever seen her. She had been so anxious that she had sent the police to look for us. But, of course, they had not found us. You ought to make allowances for what people do when they are anxious, so I forgive her everything, even what she said about Oswald being a disgrace to a respectable house. He owns we were rather muddy, owing to the fight.
And when the jaw was over and we were having tea — and there was meat to it, because we were as near starving as I ever wish to be — we all ate lots. Even the thought of Pincher could not thwart o
ur bold appetites, though we kept saying, “Poor old Pincher!” “I do wish we’d found him,” and things like that. The parrot walked about among the tea-things as tame as tame. And just as Alice was saying how we’d go out again to-morrow and have another try for our faithful hound there was a scratching at the door, and we rushed — and there was Pincher, perfectly well and mad with joy to see us.
H.O. turned an abrupt beetroot colour.
“Oh!” he said.
We said, “What? Out with it.”
And though he would much rather have kept it a secret buried in his breast, we made him own that he had shut Pincher up yesterday in the empty rabbit-hutch when he was playing Zoological Gardens and forgotten all about it in the pleasures of our cousin having left us.
So we need not have gone over the water at all. But though Oswald pities all dumb animals, especially those helplessly shut in rabbit-hutches at the bottoms of gardens, he cannot be sorry that we had such a Celestial adventure and got hold of such a parrot. For Alice says that Oswald and Dicky and she shall have the parrot between them.
She is tremendously straight. I often wonder why she was made a girl. She’s a jolly sight more of a gentleman than half the boys at our school.
THE YOUNG ANTIQUARIES
This really happened before Christmas, but many authors go back to bygone years for whole chapters, and I don’t see why I shouldn’t.
It was one Sunday — the Somethingth Sunday in Advent, I think — and Denny and Daisy and their father and Albert’s uncle came to dinner, which is in the middle of the day on that day of rest and the same things to eat for grown-ups and us. It is nearly always roast beef and Yorkshire, but the puddings and vegetables are brightly variegated and never the same two Sundays running.
At dinner some one said something about the coat-of-arms that is on the silver tankards which once, when we were poor and honest, used to stay at the shop having the dents slowly taken out of them for months and months. But now they are always at home and are put at the four corners of the table every day, and any grown-up who likes can drink beer out of them.
After some talk of the sort you don’t listen to, in which bends and lioncels and gules and things played a promising part, Albert’s uncle said that Mr. Turnbull had told him something about that coat-of-arms being carved on a bridge somewhere in Cambridgeshire, and again the conversation wandered into things like Albert’s uncle had talked about to the Maidstone Antiquarian Society the day they came over to see his old house in the country and we arranged the time-honoured Roman remains for them to dig up. So, hearing the words king-post and mullion and moulding and underpin, Oswald said might we go; and we went, and took our dessert with us and had it in our own common-room, where you can roast chestnuts with a free heart and never mind what your fingers get like.
When first we knew Daisy we used to call her the White Mouse, and her brother had all the appearance of being one too, but you know how untruthful appearances are, or else it was that we taught him happier things, for he certainly turned out quite different in the end; and she was not a bad sort of kid, though we never could quite cure her of wanting to be “ladylike” — that is the beastliest word there is, I think, and Albert’s uncle says so, too. He says if a girl can’t be a lady it’s not worth while to be only like one — she’d better let it alone and be a free and happy bounder.
But all this is not what I was going to say, only the author does think of so many things besides the story, and sometimes he puts them in. This is the case with Thackeray and the Religious Tract Society and other authors, as well as Mrs. Humphrey Ward. Only I don’t suppose you have ever heard of her, though she writes books that some people like very much. But perhaps they are her friends. I did not like the one I read about the Baronet. It was on a wet Sunday at the seaside, and nothing else in the house but Bradshaw and “Elsie; or like a — —” or I shouldn’t have. But what really happened to us before Christmas is strictly the following narrative.
“I say,” remarked Denny, when he had burned his fingers with a chestnut that turned out a bad one after all — and such is life — and he had finished sucking his fingers and getting rid of the chestnut, “about these antiquaries?”
“Well, what about them?” said Oswald. He always tries to be gentle and kind to Denny, because he knows he helped to make a man of the young Mouse.
“I shouldn’t think,” said Denny, “that it was so very difficult to be one.”
“I don’t know,” said Dicky. “You have to read very dull books and an awful lot of them, and remember what you read, what’s more.”
“I don’t think so,” said Alice. “That girl who came with the antiquities — the one Albert’s uncle said was upholstered in red plush like furniture — she hadn’t read anything, you bet.”
Dora said, “You ought not to bet, especially on Sunday,” and Alice altered it to “You may be sure.”
“Well, but what then?” Oswald asked Denny. “Out with it,” for he saw that his youthful friend had got an idea and couldn’t get it out. You should always listen patiently to the ideas of others, no matter how silly you expect them to be.
“I do wish you wouldn’t hurry me so,” said Denny, snapping his fingers anxiously. And we tried to be patient.
“Why shouldn’t we be them?” Denny said at last.
“He means antiquaries,” said Oswald to the bewildered others. “But there’s nowhere to go and nothing to do when we get there.”
The Dentist (so-called for short, his real name being Denis) got red and white, and drew Oswald aside to the window for a secret discussion. Oswald listened as carefully as he could, but Denny always buzzes so when he whispers.
“Right oh,” he remarked, when the confidings of the Dentist had got so that you could understand what he was driving at. “Though you’re being shy with us now, after all we went through together in the summer, is simply skittles.”
Then he turned to the polite and attentive others and said —
OSWALD LISTENED AS CAREFULLY AS HE COULD, BUT DENNY ALWAYS BUZZES SO WHEN HE WHISPERS.
“You remember that day we went to Bexley Heath with Albert’s uncle? Well, there was a house, and Albert’s uncle said a clever writer lived there, and in more ancient years that chap in history — Sir Thomas What’s his name; and Denny thinks he might let us be antiquaries there. It looks a ripping place from the railway.”
It really does. It’s a fine big house, and splendid gardens, and a lawn with a sundial, and the tallest trees anywhere about here.
“But what could we do?” said Dicky. “I don’t suppose he’d give us tea,” though such, indeed, had been our hospitable conduct to the antiquaries who came to see Albert’s uncle.
“Oh, I don’t know,” said Alice. “We might dress up for it, and wear spectacles, and we could all read papers. It would be lovely — something to fill up the Christmas holidays — the part before the wedding, I mean. Do let’s.”
“All right, I don’t mind. I suppose it would be improving,” said Dora. “We should have to read a lot of history. You can settle it. I’m going to show Daisy our bridesmaids’ dresses.”
It was, alas! too true. Albert’s uncle was to be married but shortly after, and it was partly our faults, though that does not come into this story.
So the two D.’s went to look at the clothes — girls like this — but Alice, who wishes she had never consented to be born a girl, stayed with us, and we had a long and earnest council about it.
“One thing,” said Oswald, “it can’t possibly be wrong — so perhaps it won’t be amusing.”
“Oh, Oswald!” said Alice, and she spoke rather like Dora.
“I don’t mean what you mean,” said Oswald in lofty scorn. “What I mean to say is that when a thing is quite sure to be right, it’s not so — well — I mean to say there it is, don’t you know; and if it might be wrong, and isn’t, it’s a score to you; and if it might be wrong, and is — as so often happens — well, you know yourself, adventure
s sometimes turn out wrong that you didn’t think were going to, but seldom, or never, the uninteresting kind, and — —”
Dicky told Oswald to dry up — which, of course, no one stands from a younger brother, but though Oswald explained this at the time, he felt in his heart that he has sometimes said what he meant with more clearness. When Oswald and Dicky had finished, we went on and arranged everything.
Every one was to write a paper — and read it.
“If the papers are too long to read while we’re there,” said Noël, “we can read them in the long winter evenings when we are grouped along the household hearthrug. I shall do my paper in poetry — about Agincourt.”
Some of us thought Agincourt wasn’t fair, because no one could be sure about any knight who took part in that well-known conflict having lived in the Red House; but Alice got us to agree, because she said it would be precious dull if we all wrote about nothing but Sir Thomas Whatdoyoucallhim — whose real name in history Oswald said he would find out, and then write his paper on that world-renowned person, who is a household word in all families. Denny said he would write about Charles the First, because they were just doing that part at his school.
“I shall write about what happened in 1066,” said H.O. “I know that.”
Alice said, “If I write a paper it will be about Mary Queen of Scots.”
Dora and Daisy came in just as she said this, and it transpired that this ill-fated but good-looking lady was the only one they either of them wanted to write about. So Alice gave it up to them and settled to do Magna Charta, and they could settle something between themselves for the one who would have to give up Mary Queen of Scots in the end. We all agreed that the story of that lamented wearer of pearls and black velvet would not make enough for two papers.
