by Edith Nesbit
All this time we had never had a moment for gardening, and Chloe’s dream of growing our own vegetables was being swiftly hidden by the weeds of oblivion. There were flowers in plenty, though, now. Hundreds of roses, red and white and yellow. Thousands of pink roses. Canterbury-bells, red daisy-flowers, lupins, columbines, and giant larkspurs. Chloe kept the house a flowery bower. I cleaned the boots and the knives, and whistled at my work. It was when half the neck of mutton got into that covered basket and, ostrich-like, left its tail sticking out, that I told Mrs. Coombe that we must part. She asked for no explanation; I gave none. We parted without unnecessary words. That day it began to rain — a thunder-storm first, then slow, steady, pelting rain for hours and hours. We sat over the kitchen fire that evening and told ghost stories till I saw my wife beginning to cast glances over her shoulder to where the darker shadows lurked in the corners of the great, black-raftered kitchen. Then I lit twelve candles, set then on the mantel-piece, and made port-wine negus, and we drank it and went to bed.
In the pitch-dark middle of the night, Chloe caught me by the arm.
“You must wake up,” she said, in a terrified whisper; “there’s some one in the house — or — or something. I’ve been awake for hours. Listen! Can’t you hear it?”
I listened.
“It’s like — Oh, Len, I am so frightened It’s a sort of dripping, dripping.”
She held me very tight with both hands.
“It’s like — it’s as if some one had been killed and there was blood dripping onto the floor. Oh, listen, and do strike a light! I’m afraid to put my arm out for the matches. It is like blood, dripping! Listen!”
I listened.
And it was.
III. THE GHOST
I HAD held my breath to listen to the drip, drip — loud in itself and hollow in its echo through the grisly silence of the middle night. Now I let my breath go in a sigh.
“It is blood, dripping,” said Chloe.
“It can’t be,” I said; “there’s no one in the house to kill any one else — and no one to be killed, either. Don’t be a darling idiot.”
“Perhaps it’s some one who was killed long ago!” Her teeth chattered.
“A ghost, you mean?” I said, cheerfully. “Not it! I expect some tramp’s got in and upset a beer-bottle. Let me get my boots and the poker.”
I had always resolved that in no straits would I ever, barefooted, face a burglar. Think of the horrible advantage of hobnailed burglar-boots over shrinking, bare toes.
“But there is no poker up here,” Chloe said. “You know we never could find the bedroom fire-irons. My umbrella; you know — the one with the purple knob.”
One of the ugliest of our wedding presents, the umbrella with the rock-amethyst handle the size of a fives-ball, stood in the wardrobe corner. I balanced it in my hand.
“I think it would crack a nut, if need were,” said I—”even the most hardened nut of the most hardened burglar.”
“How can you?” said Chloe. She was creeping into her dressing-gown. “Now, then — I’ll carry the light.”
“You’re not coming with me?”
“Do you think I’m going to stay here alone?”
“But if it is a burglar?”
“Exactly—”
“You mean you’re coming to take care of me?”
“Oh, don’t,” she said—”only I will come.”
I blew out the candle and took her hand.
“If we are to surprise any enterprising professional, we sha’n’t do it with a candle,” said I. “Now, then—”
We opened the door slowly and softly, and very softly and slowly crept along the dark passage hand in hand.
At the stair-foot we stood still and listened. Not a sound but the drip-drip-dripping. It seemed to come from the white parlor.
My wife clutched my hand in both hers.
“I can’t,” she whispered, and struck a match. Her hands trembled so that she could hardly light the candle.
I took it from her.
“You’d better go back,” I said. But we went on.
I flung open the door of the white parlor, while Chloe stood with her back to the wall, hiding her face in her hands.
I took two steps into the darkness. Then I laughed aloud and put down the candle on the table.
“Len, what is it? Oh — what is it?”
“It’s all right, dear,” I said, “but it’s fortunate I brought the umbrella.”
I put it up as I spoke, and, catching Chloe’s hand, drew her under it. The drops splashed on the umbrella heavily from the ceiling above. Chloe and I looked in each other’s eyes and laughed.
“Oh dear, how silly! Why, it’s only the water coming through the roof!”
“Yes — only!” said I. The floor was an inch deep in water, and from the ceiling it was falling, in heavy, capricious showers, on furniture, books, cushions, curtains.
“You’re not frightened now?” I asked, shutting the wet umbrella with a flap.
“No.”
“Then we’d better get dressed and see what can be done.”
We dressed hastily and lit the candles in the tall, old brass candlesticks on the white-parlor mantel-piece. It took us some little time to find places, where these could stand without prompt extinguishment from the dripping ceiling.
Then, barefooted both, with my trousers tucked up, and Chloe’s skirts kilted to the knee, we did our best with pails and mops and house flannels.
We carried all our books out into the hall, and stood them up on their edges, with their leaves open, to dry. We carried out our furniture-the settle, and the gate-table, and the rush-bottomed beechwood chairs. We took down the wet curtains and hung them on the bacon-rack in the kitchen. “I do wish we kept a pig,” said Chloe, in parenthesis. “Fancy sides of bacon swinging here, instead of wet, floppy, droppy curtains!” It was a night’s work. When the gray of the dawn showed us, through rain-wrinkled window-panes, the green tangle of our garden, all beaten down to one dripping desolation, with a gray sky above, and over all the rain, I looked at my wife and said:
“This has been an adventurous night. It is a ghastly morning. Do people who have been up all night have breakfast? Tea, for instance? You are wet as any mermaid, and twice as pretty. But water’s not your native element. You must be dried. I’ll light a fire.”
She had caught at the rope of bright hair that hung below her waist, and was wringing the water out of it. Her bare feet were pink and rosy in the mixed radiance of dawn and candlelight. Her striped red-and-white skirts gave her a sort of coquettish smartness, as of a Parisienne at Trouville. She held out her hand with a dramatic gesture.
“Come with your mermaid,” she said; “come and light a fire of driftwood in her ocean cave.”
She led me through the kitchen to the little room where we worked. A fire burned red and glowing; on her drawing-table, white damask covered, were bread, butter, tea-things. The brass kettle sang softly on the hob.
“The ghost must have done this,” said I. “You said you’d make it run errands, but I never thought you’d get it to light fires.”
“But I did, you see,” said Chloe. “I taught it — little odd minutes when you were carrying buckets and sticking up damp books on their poor tails, so that you shouldn’t notice what I was doing. Isn’t it a clever ghost? Aren’t I a good teacher?”
“You are an angel,” I said. “I’ll make the tea.”
“Aren’t I a noble wife? Aren’t you proud of me? Don’t you love me very, very, very?” said she.
“Not exactly,” said I, holding her in one arm and making the tea with the other. “Respect, admiration for your talents — look out, you nearly had the teapot over! — but love! Don’t be exacting — and don’t shake my arm, or I shall scald us both. Go and get something dry on, and I’ll cut some sandwiches.”
“And you don’t love me?”
“I might like you better if you were dry. Go! Run! Skurry!”
“The potted meat is in the chiffonnier,” she said. “Are you going to keep wet?”
“Yes, I’ve got to go out and see what there is on the roof, as soon as it’s light enough to see to put up a ladder. Madam, withdraw, and take five drops of eucalyptus oil on a piece of sugar.”
It was rather a pleasant breakfast, though the drip, drip, drip went on merrily all the time.
When the last sandwich had vanished Chloe put her elbows on the table and said:
“Len, I’m afraid it’s very wrong, but I’ve rather enjoyed myself. I seem to like things to happen. But, oh, what a mess everything is in!”
“It is,” said I, “but I do, too. And it is wicked — a morbid craving for excitement, even at the expense of a cherished library — the cream of our country’s literature. Now put on your macker, and we’ll go up on the roof.”
I helped her into her mackintosh, and we went.
The roof of the white parlor is one of the leaded spaces on the wings of the Red House. It has a parapet at back and front. These formed a sort of tank; all the waste-pipes were stuffed up with leaves and twigs, and I pulled a black, sodden starlings’ nest out of one of them. The rain came down pitilessly. I looked about me. I knew that, below, the flood in the white parlor must be momently gaining in depth and intensity.
“Chloe,” I said, “this is no time to be tender of bricks and mortar. Go and fetch the bass-broom, and I will seek for the coal-hammer.”
I found it, after some search, in the pantry. I had taken it there myself, I remember, in the avowed belief that it, and it only, could serve to break into the first gooseberry pie of Chloe’s making. I brought it up onto the roof, and with it smashed away the bricks and cement till I had a two-foot embrasure in the back parapet. Then I paused. A moment’s silence full of concentrated reflection broke as I said, “Wife of my heart, to think that quite by accident you have married a mechanical genius!”
Then we went to find the spade. With it we dug clay from the banks of one of the little streams which feed our moat. I transported it in the wheelbarrow, always through the rain, to the scene of action, and we raised it to the roof by a cord and the waste-paper basket. With it I built a dam round my embrasure. Then again I paused in Napoleonic meditation, and then —
“The dust-pan, beloved,” I said, looking down on my wife’s pink, rain-wet face.
Then I knocked over the last three inches at the bottom of my embrasure. The water from within my dam rushed out down the face of the house — behind the dam lay the tank of water, but my dam held firm.
“And now a broom-handle, soul of my soul — or, I’ll tell you what, that garden rake we’ve never used, and some clothes-line.”
I spliced the dust-pan’s handle at right an- angles gles to the handle of the rake, and laid this last across the embrasure. The parapet held its ends securely, and the dust-pan, face downward, projected itself out through the opening. I made all fast with clay and then called Chloe to come up the step-ladder and share with me the triumphant moment when my dam should be broken down and my new dust-pan-cum-rake water-shoot come into play. One’s wife should share one’s joys as well as one’s sorrows, I said.
The ingenious contrivance, which I thrilled to have found myself capable of devising, acted perfectly. I kicked my dam to pieces, and the imprisoned water behind rushed impetuously through the embrasure, and, directed by the trusty dust-pan, fell in a cataract a yard and a half from the house, to meander away harmlessly along the gravel path. I helped the flowing tide with the bass-broom, and all the while the rain splashed and spun and sputtered on mackintosh and bared heads. When the leads held but half an inch of water I strengthened the dust-pan and rake with clay, and we went indoors.
The white parlor was unspeakably wet — but the water no longer dripped from the roof.
We mopped again, dried and dressed, and did our ordinary house-work. Then the sun came out. We took cushions and rugs onto the balcony, and fell asleep. We slept till late in the afternoon. Then I went to fetch a plumber. He came, many days later, cleared the wastepipes, and sent me in a bill for £2 17 s. shillings 7 d. pence This was the first charge on the legacy we had received from my uncle.
The second was made by the inspector of the water company. He compelled us to put in new patent taps all over the house. This cost £7 9 s. shillings 3 d. pence ; and when a grand-maternal government came down on us about the question of sinks and overflow-pipes — Chloe, in my absence, had the misfortune to cringe before its minion — the matter ended in a bill of £29 19 s. shillings 11 d. pence
Then I said: “Chloe, ruin stares us in the face. When we lived in the Bandbox—”
“Yes, I know,” she interrupted, “but there’s such a lot to do here.”
“The ‘ouse is too large and the work too ‘eavy,” I quoted.
“It isn’t that, but everything’s so large,” she said. “Why, it takes me two hours to do the flowers, and they must be done three times a week at least.”
“We must go flowerless, Chloe, or seek the refuge of the neighboring workhouse. Now, in the Bandbox—”
“Yes, I know,” she said again. “Oh, Len, don’t scold — it’s horrid of you!”
Remorselessly I pursued my advantage, for Chloe seemed to be in a yielding mood.
“In the Bandbox—” I began, but she caught me by the shoulders and shook me and took the words out of my mouth.
“In the Bandbox,” she said, “I worked and you worked. And now we don’t either of us work a bit more than we can help. And I know why it is, too — we’ve both found out how interesting other things are. You’d rather chop wood or clean the boots than write your nasty, dull articles and stories, and I’d rather put up shelves and arrange flowers than draw silly pictures of idiotic people for imbecile magazines. We’re both demoralized by — what do you call it? — the joy of life. I hate work. I wish it was dead!”
“Don’t you call sweeping and scrubbing and cooking work?”
She hesitated, then: “No,” she cried, defiantly, “it isn’t. Work is what you hate doing, and have to do for your living. Anything else is play — you know it is!”
“My gentle playfellow, we must work — either here, in our own Red House, or in the yellow brick mansion provided by a tender country for its more obvious failures. The Red House or the Union — which is it to be?”
“There’s Uncle James’s two hundred,” she said, with a mutinous glance.
“Chloe, Chloe,” I said, “I speak more in sorrow than in anger. In the Bandbox — yes, I insist on my right to mention that hallowed spot as often as I choose — you went to town twice a week to wring remunerative orders for illustrations from the flinty hearts of editors. You have often explained to me that to be on the spot is the thing. The work is given to the people who look after it. How often have you been to London since my birthday? Once — and that was the day when you went to the registry-office and brought back the fiend who burned the bottom out of the kitchen kettle.”
She hung her head and said I was just as bad.
“I know it, but I am a practical reformer. Reforms personally attended to. Brush my frockcoat, please, if you have any idea where it is, and my high hat, if you can find it. I am going to town this afternoon. In my absence I expect you to finish your illustration for the Lady’s Battalion — the one where the duchess is dis- discharging charging her butler for shaving in the boudoir, and leaving his shaving-brush on the marble console-table.”
“You’re not nice. You know it is a humble companion refusing a duke’s offer of marriage. He does look like a footman, I know; her arm is all wrong, and his legs are hideously out of drawing. Legs are so difficult to do, especially in clothes. We never had models in trousers at the Slade School—”
“Ah, these art-schools!” I said. “Now find that frock-coat, my Michaela Angelica, and speed the parting reformer.”
“I think I saw it once in the dresser drawer,” she said, dreamily. “If you’d seen it you’d have put it aw
ay. Len, talking of shaving-brushes, how is it I used to be so tidy in the Bandbox, and you not, and now you’re tidier than I am?”
“It is your influence,” said I.
“And the other’s mine?”
“Well,” I answered, “when two people are moderately fond of each other they do teach each other things, don’t they?”
“Then you’ve corrupted me?”
“And you’ve redeemed me, or are redeeming. When we’ve quite converted each other we can begin again and change back. But the coat, and the hat. I must shave, and there’s only just time to catch the 11.32. For the sake of our home, for the sake of our future, for the peace of our domestic existence, Chloe, do try to find that hat and that coat!”
The hat was all right, but the coat was full of creases. It was not in the dresser drawer, after all, but on the bottom shelf of the oak side-board, and I had to iron it before I could dream of putting it on. Chloe told me how to do it, but she owned that I did it far better than she could have done it herself. My best boots were mislaid, too, as it happened, and, before I had discovered them in a corner of the bare drawing-room, I had missed the 11.32. I went up by the 12.40, however, and in the train I wondered to myself how it was that Chloe, who in the Bandbox had kept all in so neat an array, was now growing more untidy than I in my most reckless moods had ever been. It was a problem, and I bent myself to it as the train whirled me through green pastures outlined with elm-trees and hawthorn hedges, then through villas, red and self-consciously trim, with their neat gardens, geranium-flushed, calceolaria-gilded — neat as a prize map at a first-class high-school. The problem did not resolve itself. It was not till the train was rushing through a wilderness of yellow brick houses, all alike, all soot-begrimed, all standing, with their bits of blackened garden, their stunted flowers, their carefully trained snippets of creeper, for lives full of the courageous struggle of man’s innate love of beauty against the iron of environment, the crippling of the accident of birth, the handicap of hereditary submission to the undeserved darkening of life, that I began to see the answer to my question.
