by Edith Nesbit
After dinner we sat on the sea-wall, feeling more like after dinner than we had felt for days, and Dora said —
“Poor Miss Sandal! I never thought about her being hard-up, somehow. I wish we could do something to help her.”
“We might go out street-singing,” Noël said. But that was no good, because there is only one street in the village, and the people there are much too poor for one to be able to ask them for anything. And all round it is fields with only sheep, who have nothing to give except their wool, and when it comes to taking that, they are never asked.
Dora thought we might get Father to give her money, but Oswald knew this would never do.
Then suddenly a thought struck some one — I will not say who — and that some one said —
“She ought to let lodgings, like all the other people do in Lymchurch.”
That was the beginning of it. The end — for that day — was our getting the top of a cardboard box and printing on it the following lines in as many different coloured chalks as we happened to have with us.
LODGINGS TO LET.
ENQUIRE INSIDE.
We ruled spaces for the letters to go in, and did it very neatly. When we went to bed we stuck it in our bedroom window with stamp-paper.
In the morning when Oswald drew up his blind there was quite a crowd of kids looking at the card. Mrs. Beale came out and shoo-ed them away as if they were hens. And we did not have to explain the card to her at all. She never said anything about it. I never knew such a woman as Mrs. Beale for minding her own business. She said afterwards she supposed Miss Sandal had told us to put up the card.
Well, two or three days went by, and nothing happened, only we had a letter from Miss Sandal, telling us how the poor sufferer was groaning, and one from Father telling us to be good children, and not get into scrapes. And people who drove by used to look at the card and laugh.
And then one day a carriage came driving up with a gentleman in it, and he saw the rainbow beauty of our chalked card, and he got out and came up the path. He had a pale face, and white hair and very bright eyes that moved about quickly like a bird’s, and he was dressed in a quite new tweed suit that did not fit him very well.
Dora and Alice answered the door before any one had time to knock, and the author has reason to believe their hearts were beating wildly.
“How much?” said the gentleman shortly.
Alice and Dora were so surprised by his suddenness that they could only reply —
“Er — er — —”
“Just so,” said the gentleman briskly as Oswald stepped modestly forward and said —
“Won’t you come inside?”
“The very thing,” said he, and came in.
We showed him into the dining-room and asked him to excuse us a minute, and then held a breathless council outside the door.
“It depends how many rooms he wants,” said Dora.
“Let’s say so much a room,” said Dicky, “and extra if he wants Mrs. Beale to wait on him.”
So we decided to do this. We thought a pound a room seemed fair.
And we went back.
“How many rooms do you want?” Oswald asked.
“All the room there is,” said the gentleman.
“They are a pound each,” said Oswald, “and extra for Mrs. Beale.”
“How much altogether?”
Oswald thought a minute and then said “Nine rooms is nine pounds, and two pounds a week for Mrs. Beale, because she is a widow.”
“HOW MUCH?” SAID THE GENTLEMAN SHORTLY.
“Done!” said the gentleman. “I’ll go and fetch my portmanteaus.”
He bounced up and out and got into his carriage and drove away. It was not till he was finally gone quite beyond recall that Alice suddenly said —
“But if he has all the rooms where are we to sleep?”
“He must be awfully rich,” said H.O., “wanting all those rooms.”
“Well, he can’t sleep in more than one at once,” said Dicky, “however rich he is. We might wait till he was bedded down and then sleep in the rooms he didn’t want.”
But Oswald was firm. He knew that if the man paid for the rooms he must have them to himself.
“He won’t sleep in the kitchen,” said Dora; “couldn’t we sleep there?”
But we all said we couldn’t and wouldn’t.
Then Alice suddenly said —
“I know! The Mill. There are heaps and heaps of fishing-nets there, and we could each take a blanket like Indians and creep over under cover of the night after the Beale has gone, and get back before she comes in the morning.”
It seemed a sporting thing to do, and we agreed. Only Dora said she thought it would be draughty.
Of course we went over to the Mill at once to lay our plans and prepare for the silent watches of the night.
There are three stories to a windmill, besides the ground-floor. The first floor is pretty empty; the next is nearly full of millstones and machinery, and the one above is where the corn runs down from on to the millstones.
We settled to let the girls have the first floor, which was covered with heaps of nets, and we would pig in with the millstones on the floor above.
We had just secretly got out the last of the six blankets from the house and got it into the Mill disguised in a clothes-basket, when we heard wheels, and there was the gentleman back again. He had only got one portmanteau after all, and that was a very little one.
Mrs. Beale was bobbing at him in the doorway when we got up. Of course we had told her he had rented rooms, but we had not said how many, for fear she should ask where we were going to sleep, and we had a feeling that but few grown-ups would like our sleeping in a mill, however much we were living the higher life by sacrificing ourselves to get money for Miss Sandal.
The gentleman ordered sheep’s-head and trotters for dinner, and when he found he could not have that he said —
“Gammon and spinach!”
But there was not any spinach in the village, so he had to fall back on eggs and bacon. Mrs. Beale cooked it, and when he had fallen back on it she washed up and went home. And we were left. We could hear the gentleman singing to himself, something about woulding he was a bird that he might fly to thee.
Then we got the lanterns that you take when you go “up street” on a dark night, and we crept over to the Mill. It was much darker than we expected.
We decided to keep our clothes on, partly for warmness and partly in case of any sudden alarm or the fishermen wanting their nets in the middle of the night, which sometimes happens if the tide is favourable.
We let the girls keep the lantern, and we went up with a bit of candle Dicky had saved, and tried to get comfortable among the millstones and machinery, but it was not easy, and Oswald, for one, was not sorry when he heard the voice of Dora calling in trembling tones from the floor below.
“Oswald! Dicky!” said the voice, “I wish one of you would come down a sec.”
Oswald flew to the assistance of his distressed sister.
“It’s only that we’re a little bit uncomfortable,” she whispered. “I didn’t want to yell it out because of Noël and H.O. I don’t want to frighten them, but I can’t help feeling that if anything popped out of the dark at us I should die. Can’t you all come down here? The nets are quite comfortable, and I do wish you would.”
Alice said she was not frightened, but suppose there were rats, which are said to infest old buildings, especially mills?
So we consented to come down, and we told Noël and H.O. to come down because it was more comfy, and it is easier to settle yourself for the night among fishing-nets than among machinery. There was a rustling now and then among the heap of broken chairs and jack-planes and baskets and spades and hoes and bits of the spars of ships at the far end of our sleeping apartment, but Dicky and Oswald resolutely said it was the wind or else jackdaws making their nests, though, of course, they knew this is not done at night.
Sleeping in a mill was not
nearly the fun we had thought it would be — somehow. For one thing, it was horrid not having a pillow, and the fishing-nets were so stiff you could not bunch them up properly to make one. And unless you have been born and bred a Red Indian you do not know how to manage your blanket so as to make it keep out the draughts. And when we had put out the light Oswald more than once felt as though earwigs and spiders were walking on his face in the dark, but when we struck a match there was nothing there.
And empty mills do creak and rustle and move about in a very odd way. Oswald was not afraid, but he did think we might as well have slept in the kitchen, because the gentleman could not have wanted to use that when he was asleep. You see, we thought then that he would sleep all night like other people.
We got to sleep at last, and in the night the girls edged up to their bold brothers, so that when the morning sun “shone in bars of dusty gold through the chinks of the aged edifice” and woke us up we were all lying in a snuggly heap like a litter of puppies.
“Oh, I am so stiff!” said Alice, stretching. “I never slept in my clothes before. It makes me feel as if I had been starched and ironed like a boy’s collar.”
We all felt pretty much the same. And our faces were tired too, and stiff, which was rum, and the author cannot account for it, unless it really was spiders that walked on us. I believe the ancient Greeks considered them to be venomous, and perhaps that’s how their venom influences their victims.
“I think mills are merely beastly,” remarked H.O. when we had woke him up. “You can’t wash yourself or brush your hair or anything.”
“You aren’t always so jolly particular about your hair,” said Dicky.
“Don’t be so disagreeable,” said Dora.
And Dicky rejoined, “Disagreeable yourself!”
There is certainly something about sleeping in your clothes that makes you feel not so kind and polite as usual. I expect this is why tramps are so fierce and knock people down in lonely roads and kick them. Oswald knows he felt just like kicking any one if they had happened to cheek him the least little bit. But by a fortunate accident nobody did.
The author believes there is a picture called “Hopeless Dawn.” We felt exactly like that. Nothing seemed the least bit of good.
It was a pitiful band with hands and faces dirtier than any one would believe who had not slept in a mill or witnessed others who had done so, that crossed the wet, green grass between the Mill and the white house.
“I shan’t ever put morning dew into my poetry again,” Noël said; “it is not nearly so poetical as people make out, and it is as cold as ice, right through your boots.”
We felt rather better when we had had a good splash in the brick-paved back kitchen that Miss Sandal calls the bath-room. And Alice made a fire and boiled a kettle and we had some tea and eggs. Then we looked at the clock and it was half-past five. So we hastened to get into another part of the house before Mrs. Beale came.
“I wish we’d tried to live the higher life some less beastly way,” said Dicky as we went along the passage.
“Living the higher life always hurts at the beginning,” Alice said. “I expect it’s like new boots, only when you’ve got used to it you’re glad you bore it at first. Let’s listen at the doors till we find out where he isn’t sleeping.”
So we listened at all the bedroom doors, but not a snore was heard.
“Perhaps he was a burglar,” said H.O., “and only pretended to want lodgings so as to get in and bone all the valuables.”
“There aren’t any valuables,” said Noël, and this was quite true, for Miss Sandal had no silver or jewellery except a brooch of pewter, and the very teaspoons were of wood — very hard to keep clean and having to be scraped.
“Perhaps he sleeps without snoring,” said Oswald, “some people do.”
“Not old gentlemen,” said Noël; “think of our Indian uncle — H.O. used to think it was bears at first.”
“Perhaps he rises with the lark,” said Alice, “and is wondering why brekker isn’t ready.”
So then we listened at the sitting-room doors, and through the keyhole of the parlour we heard a noise of some one moving, and then in a soft whistle the tune of the “Would I were a bird” song.
So then we went into the dining-room to sit down. But when we opened the door we almost fell in a heap on the matting, and no one had breath for a word — not even for “Krikey,” which was what we all thought.
I have read of people who could not believe their eyes; and I have always thought it such rot of them, but now, as the author gazed on the scene, he really could not be quite sure that he was not in a dream, and that the gentleman and the night in the Mill weren’t dreams too.
“Pull back the curtains,” Alice said, and we did. I wish I could make the reader feel as astonished as we did.
The last time we had seen the room the walls had been bare and white. Now they were covered with the most splendid drawings you can think of, all done in coloured chalk — I don’t mean mixed up, like we do with our chalks — but one picture was done in green, and another in brown, and another in red, and so on. And the chalk must have been of some fat radiant kind quite unknown to us, for some of the lines were over an inch thick.
“How perfectly lovely!” Alice said; “he must have sat up all night to do it. He is good. I expect he’s trying to live the higher life, too — just going about doing secretly, and spending his time making other people’s houses pretty.”
“I wonder what he’d have done if the room had had a large pattern of brown roses on it, like Mrs. Beale’s,” said Noël. “I say, look at that angel! Isn’t it poetical? It makes me feel I must write something about it.”
It was a good angel — all drawn in grey, that was — with very wide wings going right across the room, and a whole bundle of lilies in his arms. Then there were seagulls and ravens, and butterflies, and ballet girls with butterflies’ wings, and a man with artificial wings being fastened on, and you could see he was just going to jump off a rock. And there were fairies, and bats, and flying-foxes, and flying-fish. And one glorious winged horse done in red chalk — and his wings went from one side of the room to the other, and crossed the angel’s. There were dozens and dozens of birds — all done in just a few lines — but exactly right. You couldn’t make any mistake about what anything was meant for.
And all the things, whatever they were, had wings to them. How Oswald wishes that those pictures had been done in his house!
While we stood gazing, the door of the other room opened, and the gentleman stood before us, more covered with different-coloured chalks than I should have thought he could have got, even with all those drawings, and he had a thing made of wire and paper in his hand, and he said —
“Wouldn’t you like to fly?”
“Yes,” said every one.
“Well then,” he said, “I’ve got a nice little flying-machine here. I’ll fit it on to one of you, and then you jump out of the attic window. You don’t know what it’s like to fly.”
We said we would rather not.
“But I insist,” said the gentleman. “I have your real interest at heart, my children — I can’t allow you in your ignorance to reject the chance of a lifetime.”
We still said “No, thank you,” and we began to feel very uncomfy, for the gentleman’s eyes were now rolling wildly.
“Then I’ll make you!” he said, catching hold of Oswald.
“You jolly well won’t,” cried Dicky, catching hold of the arm of the gentleman.
“THEN I’LL MAKE YOU!” HE SAID, CATCHING HOLD OF OSWALD.
Then Dora said very primly and speaking rather slowly, and she was very pale —
“I think it would be lovely to fly. Will you just show me how the flying-machine looks when it is unfolded?”
The gentleman dropped Oswald, and Dora made “Go! go” with her lips without speaking, while he began to unfold the flying-machine. We others went, Oswald lingering last, and then in an instant Dora
had nipped out of the room and banged the door and locked it.
“To the Mill!” she cried, and we ran like mad, and got in and barred the big door, and went up to the first floor, and looked out of the big window to warn off Mrs. Beale.
And we thumped Dora on the back, and Dicky called her a Sherlock Holmes, and Noël said she was a heroine.
“It wasn’t anything,” Dora said, just before she began to cry, “only I remember reading that you must pretend to humour them, and then get away, for of course I saw at once he was a lunatic. Oh, how awful it might have been! He could have made us all jump out of the attic window, and there would have been no one left to tell Father. Oh! oh!” and then the crying began.
But we were proud of Dora, and I am sorry we make fun of her sometimes, but it is difficult not to.
We decided to signal the first person that passed, and we got Alice to take off her red flannel petticoat for a signal.
The first people who came were two men in a dog-cart. We waved the signalising petticoat and they pulled up, and one got out and came up to the Mill.
We explained about the lunatic and the wanting us to jump out of the windows.
“Right oh!” cried the man to the one still in the cart; “got him.” And the other hitched the horse to the gate and came over, and the other went to the house.
“Come along down, young ladies and gentlemen,” said the second man when he had been told. “He’s as gentle as a lamb. He does not think it hurts to jump out of windows. He thinks it really is flying. He’ll be like an angel when he sees the doctor.”
We asked if he had been mad before, because we had thought he might have suddenly gone so.
“Certainly he has!” replied the man; “he has never been, so to say, himself since tumbling out of a flying-machine he went up in with a friend. He was an artist previous to that — an excellent one, I believe. But now he only draws objects with wings — and now and then he wants to make people fly — perfect strangers sometimes, like yourselves. Yes, miss, I am his attendant, and his pictures often amuse me by the half-hours together, poor gentleman.”
“How did he get away?” Alice asked.
