Complete Novels of E Nesbit

by Edith Nesbit

  “I am,” said Madeline. “I’ve been up ages. I thought you would never wake.”

  “Well, I am awake now,” said our hero; “what’s the matter?”

  “I can’t tell you here,” she said. “The servants are next door, you know. They might hear what we’re saying. Come down to the landing.”

  “Is it burglars?” said Clifford courageously.

  “I think you’ll think it’s worse than that, ever so much worse,” said Madeline darkly.

  Clifford always puts his boots on if he thinks it is burglars. It is the least you can do. He put them on now though Madeline had said it wasn’t, and his greatcoat, and then rejoined the hideous-looking Madeline, and the two crept down together to the first landing, where the gas was turned down to a blue bead. So it was, down in the hall. The doctor uncle always leaves it on in case of people being ill in the night and coming to fetch him in a hurry.

  “Go ahead,” said Clifford, burrowing his ears in his greatcoat. “And if this is a plant you’ll be sorry, that’s all.”

  “I haven’t any heart for plants,” said the miserable Madeline. “Suppose I was as good as a murderer, don’t you think you ought to know?”

  Clifford said not to drivel but out with it. He was chilly and sleepy. He hopes he was not cross; he tried to understand. But you know what girls are, making a fuss about the inmost secrets of the heart at the wrong times.

  “I’m not drivelling,” said Madeline, “not in the least. I mean—”

  She stopped dead short.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean—” Once more the dead shortness occurred.

  “You mean you said you wished someone was dead? Well, you oughtn’t to because they might be, and then how would you feel?”

  My father told me this, and I thought it might do Madeline good.

  “I never did any such thing,” she indignantly answered. “I do think you’re horrid.”

  “Well,” said Clifford, dreadfully patient, but raging inside, “go ahead.”

  You will find it difficult to believe, but Madeline then said:

  “No, I won’t go ahead. I thought I could tell you, but I can’t. Go back to bed, Clifford.”

  Now what’s the use of a girl like that? Clifford tried to get her to tell, remembering that he was what his own headmaster calls in loco parentis because of Madeline’s mother being so remote in the wilds of India. But it was no good. She only said, “No, no, no” about seventy times and then went back into her room and slammed the door in a whisper.

  Our hero went back to bed not pleased. The next day the doctor uncle was not called out at breakfast-time. So he had brek with us and it was jolly. He was more like the uncle who comes and stays with us. We had pineapple jam and two large piles of buttered toast, besides the dry bits in the toast-rack and the marmalade of ordinary life. But Madeline only took the dry kind of toast, and only one piece of that, and no pineapple jam at all. So Clifford knew that the snivelling events of the night before were not a dream, which he had thought they were at first when he woke up in the morning and remembered how in the deep midnight hours the giant mouse had scratched.

  “I did mean,” said Uncle Edward, when he had finished all the breakfast he wanted, “to suggest an afternoon at the local Hippodrome, but some of my patients are not as well as could be expected. No Hippodrome for us, I’m afraid.... Never mind; better luck next time.”

  We said thank you very much.

  This endearing uncle, for such he now was, then put his hand in his pocket and pulled out a lot of mixed money, some of it was gold. Out of the mixture he picked three separate half-crowns and gave one to each of us with the remark: “Have a little jollification amongst yourselves to make up for the loss of the Hippodrome — sounds like the loss of the Royal George — what?” and went out quickly because the telephone bell was going like mad.

  Martin and I had an interesting discussion about what we should do with our money. Martin thought rabbits. But Clifford thought something more splendid than mere rabbitry might be effected with the three half-crowns if we put them together.

  “We could get a football,” he said, “or a set of full-sized ship’s quoits.”

  “Or a pistol,” Martin said, “and pop at the cats.”

  There are a great many cats at Charrington. “Or a pair of roller-skates and take it in turns on the asphalt,” Clifford observed.

  “Or a clock-work engine,” said Martin; “three half-crowns is seven-and-sixpence.” All this time Madeline had said nothing, only made little heaps of toast crumbs on her plate and flattened them down with the spoon belonging to the egg she had hardly eaten at all. And now Clifford thought it would be only polite to intrude her in the conversation, especially as it was her half-crown too. So he said:

  “What do you say, Mads? Hadn’t we better club together and get something decent we can all play?” There was no harm in that. It was kind of Clifford. But Madeline got red and then white — a greeny sort of white, and then she said very softly and slowly:

  “I don’t play rabbits, or pistols, or football, or skates, or any of your old games. You never asked me before, all the time we’ve been here. And besides, I don’t want the nasty half-crown. You can keep it yourself if you want it so much. So there!” she added very loud and went out and slammed the door. Slammed not in a whisper this time, but in a perfect shout.

  Martin and the present author were left looking at each other over Madeline’s half-crown.

  “What on earth — ?” said Martin.

  “I don’t know,” replied our hero, and then he proceeded to tell his young brother about last night and the giant mouse-scratching that turned out to be the silly, timid fingernails of the dish — dishavailed — it’s no good, I can’t spell Latin — Madeline.

  “Well, I think you ought to have told Uncle Edward,” said Martin; “I don’t care what you say. I expect she’s going to have the scarlet, and this is the fever of deliriousness beginning.”

  Our hero had not thought of this, for a wonder, though some people say he is unusually intelligent for a boy of his age. But he wasn’t going to tell his young brother he hadn’t thought of it. So he said:

  “Rats! It’s not deliriousness. It’s just her natural Madness coming out again. You know right enough Mother said we’d got to make allowances.”

  “I’ll make allowances right enough,” said Martin, who sometimes thinks he is being clever; “what I can’t make, is anything out of it at all,” he went on. He will never let a thing alone even if it was not so bad to begin with.

  “Well,” said Clifford, and I think it was rather decent of him considering he is the eldest, “I don’t mind telling Uncle at lunch-time if you like.”

  Of course this made Martin say:

  “Don’t you be in such a precious hurry. Suppose she really meant something, and we sneaked.”

  It did not seem likely that she had meant anything, but Clifford tried to suppose it. I think myself the event was too serious for dipping lumps of sugar in the milk-jug and sucking them. Martin did this, but then he is not so old as I am.

  “If she does,” he said stickily, “it’s most likely something we’ve done and forgotten, and she thinks she’s in it — like Olive when we took the owl’s nest and she looked on and told us not to, and then cried because it was she who’d told us where it was, so it was her fault.”

  There was something in this and Clifford owned it handsomely.

  “Look here,” said Martin, “suppose I go and try and get it out of her?”

  “I tried,” said Clifford, with gloomy signification.

  “Yes, I know. But that was on the landing in the dark; and I expect she was cross with scratching at the door so long. You do sleep like a pig.”

  “I don’t sleep like a steam-roller, anyhow,” said Clifford.

  “It’s only when I’ve got a cold. You know that well enough,” said Martin. “Oh don’t let’s rag. I’ll go and try the gentle arts on the M
addy-bird. We’ve got to get on somehow. It’s no use just marking time and hitting out at each other.”

  So he went. And Clifford absently dipped lumps of sugar in the milk and sucked them. But it was only to keep from doing nothing while waiting. You know who finds some mischief still for idle hands to do, don’t you? He would not have done it during a council like Martin did. But we cannot all be heroes.

  I own he never thought Martin would have any luck, but quite soon he came back and Madeline was with him.

  “She’s going to tell us,” he said. “We are her best friends. I’ve explained that to her. And if we can help her we will.”

  “You won’t tell?” Madeline asked; and we asked her what she took us for.

  “Well,” said Madeline, “I’ll tell you if you really want me to. It was yesterday when you went out in the rain. I did think it was too horrid of you leaving me here. I know I’m a girl, but I can’t help that, and if you’d been a girl and I’d had thick boots and my hair short I wouldn’t have deserted you.”

  This made Clifford uncomfortable. Martin told him afterwards that it did him too.

  “Men must work and women must weep,” said Clifford, which is his favourite motto; and Madeline said:

  “I don’t see it. And I didn’t weep. I just went round and round the house like the thing in the riddle, and upstairs and downstairs like ‘Goosey-gander.’”

  “You’re wandering,” said Clifford gently. “Wandering? I should think I was,” said our cousin I was in loco parentis to. “You’d have wandered if you’d been left alone in a strange house a day like that. I wrote to Mother and tidied my chest of drawers and folded all my dresses properly and did my hair three times. And there was nothing more in the whole world to do. So I did my hair again, in a different way.”

  She stopped, and Clifford said “Go on. We’re yours to the death.” And she said: “Oh, no, you’re not”; and stopped again. “We are, really,” said Martin, “only do go ahead.”

  “When I couldn’t think of anything to do for ages and ages and ages I went into the dispensary. You know the bench where they put all the different bottles of medicine for ill people. Only no corks. The boy puts them in afterwards and does them up in white paper and sealing-wax. And writes the names outside. And. Pink. String.” She was getting slower and slower, like a musical box that is running down.

  We wound her up again by saying: “Well. Fire ahead.”

  “I wish,” said Madeline, “I could make you understand.” She screwed her eyes up very tight and made faces with the downstairs part of her countenance. “It was so — so — so — I don’t know. As if everything had been going on always and was going on for ever. I wanted things not to go on like that. The clock kept ticking — the one in the surgery — a different tune — time, I mean — and the kitchen clock too, because the servants were all dressing, except Esther, and she was out at the back with the fishmonger, because she is going to marry him as soon as they can get the little home together, and—”

  “Madeline,” said our hero in low, fierce tones, “if you don’t tell us what happened — I don’t believe anything did really — Martin and I will go out for the whole day and take out our dinner with us. Uncle Edward said we might any time we wanted to, and we may come back late. Or perhaps if we find a hut in the forest we shan’t come back at all. Now then!”

  “All right,” Madeline said in a hurry. “I wanted to mix the medicines all up.”

  “You what?”

  “I wanted to mix them all up. And I mixed all the things in the different bottles. There’s a big white jug in the surgery with sort of blue ribbon bands on it. Well, I poured the insides of the bottles in the jug and I got a spoon out of the kitchen and stirred them up. And when they were mixed up I filled up the bottles again.”

  “Do you mean,” said Martin slowly, “you mixed them all? So that people that have got scarlet fever will get all sorts of other illnesses’ medicines, and so will the typhoids and the whooping-coughs and the bronchitises and the housemaid’s knees and the skyatticas?”

  “I read it once in a book,” said Madeline, “what’s one man’s meat is another man’s poison, and of course it’s much more so with medicine.”

  There was a pause. Like taking a deep breath before you go in at the deep end at the swimming-bath.

  Then Clifford said — quite broken he was, no strength at all, none of the strong power that generally makes him what he is—”What did you do it for? What did you do it for?” And Madeline answered:

  “I don’t know what I wanted to do it for. To have something happen, I think. For it not to go on just like clocks ticking and you out and the servants dressing and those bottles standing there.”

  Clifford let go of Madeline’s hand and he walked all round the dining-table before he replied:

  “Didn’t you think... If some of the bottles — were any of them blue? Had they got red labels on?” he asked hastily. “Poison labels?” said Martin.

  And the wretched Madeline said, “I don’t know.”

  Gentle reader, what would you have done? Told your uncle? Well, you see, we solicited the information from the wretched Madeline that all the bottles of medicine had gone out at three o’clock yesterday. And most of them were a sixth part every hour, so nearly five-sixths of the stuff had already been lapped up by the suffering patients of the doctor uncle.

  “But aren’t there anecdotes?” Martin said; “things you give to stop the medicine doing what it’s made up it’s mind to do?” Couldn’t Uncle...”

  At this point Madeline uttered a strange choking sound and rushed from the room.

  Dear reader, I daresay we were wrong, but you know how boys are, being taught so very carefully that they mustn’t sneak whatever happens. And somehow Clifford could not bring himself to believe that there was anything in Uncle’s medicine that would hurt anybody even if it wasn’t exactly what he meant for that particular illness. All the same it was the kind of day that I don’t want to have happen again. Clifford and Martin did not mean to shun Madeline, but it turned out just as though they had. Clifford met her twice, once on the stairs and once coming out of the bathroom, where she had been washing her face, not before it was wanted, I should say. And both times she said:

  “Aren’t you sorry you left me alone that day?”

  The second time that happened Clifford felt about fed up with the whole thing, and he said:

  “Look here, you’ve got to tell Uncle.” But Madeline said, “No, I shan’t,” in a hollow voice.

  And Clifford had to remember that the bottles had gone out the day before, so the mischief was done. At dinner, which is the middle of the day and the same as grownups’ lunch, our hero said to his uncle in as bluff a way as he could assume:

  “Well, Uncle, and how are all your patients?”

  “Some better — some worse,” was the reply. “Why do you ask?”

  “Oh, something to say, you know,” said Clifford, bluffer than ever — like the old sea-dogs who never blench in the face of danger.

  “Perhaps Cliff thought they might all be cured,” said Martin, which he needn’t have done, and almost at the same time Madeline said in a voice more like the squeak of a sixpenny toy than anything human:

  “It’s polite to ask after people.”

  “Very,” said Uncle Edward. “You’re not getting on with your dinner, Madeline. What’s the matter?”

  “Nothing, thank you, Uncle,” she said, putting her knife and fork together and trying to hide undesired mutton under them.

  The afternoon was awful, and though Clifford and Martin played draughts continuously there was but little relief in this. It is a rotten game at the best of times, I think, and when in sorrow no go at all.

  Years seemed to roll on before it was tea-time. But at last it was and the bell rang for it. Clifford and his brother turned up all right for it, and Uncle Edward, by some strange miracle, was at home for tea though he had said he would not be.

  A
nd there was toast and cake and pineapple jam and marmalade, but no Madeline. The uncle had the tea bell rung again and then sent Mrs. Peard to look for his missing niece. Her search was unprevailing. Madeline was not to be found in the house. She was not in the garden. She was not in the garage, nor yet in the loft nor the yard. She had vanished away “like a beautiful dream,” if you leave out one word, and Clifford and Martin exchanged meaning looks while they thought the uncle was not looking.

  “She must have run away,” said Martin.

  “But where could she have run to?” said Uncle, getting on his overcoat to set out to look for her.

  “Home,” said Martin.

  “But why should she?” Clifford now felt it was his duty to ask.

  The uncle’s only remark was to tell us to stow it and get on our boots sharp and go out and join in the chase.

  So we did, leaving the rich muffins untasted. (When we came back it had all been cleared away, but that is like life.)

  As soon as our boots were on we went out in the cold, foggy dusk. I hate twilight, that people in poetry make such a fuss about. And we looked up and down the road, and there was a muffin-man with a green baize tray, and a lamplighter, but no Madeline.

  Then Clifford — think what you like of him for it, but, indeed, our boy hero was desperate — said to the doctor uncle: “I believe she’s gone to the police-station.”

  “What for?” was the natural question from the uncle.

  “Because of what she did yesterday,” Clifford recklessly replied.

  After this concealment was at an end and the uncle, standing in the foggy street, soon knew as much as we did. He could not believe it. And the author owns that believing things like that about girls who look so namby-pamby as Madeline is indeed hard work. But he had to in the end. So then, of course, we went to the police-station. It has a blue light over the door and you get an awful feeling when you go in there that you will never come out again except to be incorporated in prisons and Reforming Homes.

  “Have you seen a little girl?” the uncle asked a man in blue uniform who got behind a desk when he saw us coming, and took a pen out of his ear to write down anything we might say. There was a lot of gas very clear and bright, that seemed to be trying to light up your most secret thoughts. Clifford turned cold to the ends of his fingers and his feet because in the agitation of the moment he hadn’t sworn the uncle to secrecy. And perhaps mixing bottles is a felonous deed and ends in dungeons. But he needn’t have been afraid. When the inspector said that he hadn’t seen any little girl the uncle said: