Complete Novels of E Nesbit

by Edith Nesbit

  I was sitting in our little work-room one morning, pen in hand, hardly able to meet with a confident eye the white paper that, as I stared at it, seemed to stare at me in return — to stare rudely, contemptuously, in the confident superiority of its fulfilment of its destiny, as opposed to my manifest inability to fulfil mine. It was waiting to be written on, and no one could ask more of it. And I was waiting to write on it; and a good deal more than mere waiting was obviously demanded of me by our financial circumstances and my own self-respect. The six stories—”in the style of the ghost” — I longed to get them written with a longing more desperate than the longing of the lover for his mistress, the mother for her child. Though more desperate, it had not, however, the force of these natural desires, because it was not a desire for the thing in itself — not a desire to achieve, to attain — but depended for its vitality on a secondary motive. I longed to write the stories because I wanted the money they would bring to me. The longing was keen enough to be painful, not strong enough to get itself satisfied. So I sat idle, and drew fancy portraits of Chloe on the blotting-paper. I turned it over hastily as I heard her footstep on the kitchen floor, and I was bending over a virgin quarto page rimmed with unsoiled pink when she came in.

  I drew my breath in sharply. Her face, her eyes, her whole bearing announced disaster unspeakable.

  “What is it?” I cried, and I am sure I must have turned pale.

  “Len, do you love me?” she asked, clasping her hands with a charming dramatic movement.

  “Better than my life, of course,” I said, hurriedly, “but I’m just starting on this story, and if it’s some domestic detail—”

  “No, it can’t wait,” said she, sitting down on the edge of the table, “and it’s not a variation on the domestic theme. It’s the theme itself. Len — it’s all over!”

  “What’s all over?”

  “Everything. She’s going to leave.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. I was too upset to ask her. I just came to you.”

  I resisted an impulse to put aside the six re- remunerative munerative stories and spend the rest of the day in consoling my wife.

  “I don’t know what it is. We’ve been nice to her, I’m sure! She likes us — at least I thought she did. It’s Destiny — it’s like Maeterlinck — whatever we do turns out all anyhow. There’s a curse upon us!”

  “Speak for yourself,” I said, cheerfully. “You may be cursed, though it’s barely polite of you to say so, but I am blessed above all that live, I’m blessed if I’m not — since you—”

  She stamped her foot. “Don’t you see,” she said, “it’s serious, horribly serious? I wish I had never come here. I wish we were back in the Bandbox — there! Now crow over me, and tell me you told me so all the time!”

  I told her something quite different, and presently, when we were calmer, I said,

  “At least we may as well know why she’s going.”

  “I’ll ask her,” said Chloe, drying her eyes. “It’s probably Prosser. If I were you I should just take him by the shoulders and turn him out. You’re quite strong enough.”

  “Yes, and have an action for assault and a hundred pounds’ damages,” said I, wise with the wisdom of my solicitor. “Go and ask her. Perhaps it’s not Prosser. Even he, fiend with- without out references as he is, can’t be responsible for everything. Perhaps she’s seen the ghost.”

  I had completed a fancy sketch of Mary giving notice, and alleging her reasons by unmistakable gestures indicating the ghost, in the background, when Chloe returned.

  “Well?” said I.

  “Well?” said she.

  “Have you found out?”

  “It’s all right,” said Chloe, with a sigh of deep relief. “We haven’t done anything. She is awfully fond of us — but she must go.”

  “Why?”

  “She’s going to marry the baker.”

  “Lucky man!”

  “It’s a love-affair,” said Chloe—”the prettiest story. They couldn’t marry before because he wasn’t well enough off, and now an uncle has left him some money, and he’s bought a partnership.”

  “And how long have they been waiting for each other? How many long years of priceless constancy, tried like gold in the furnace?”

  “That’s the worst of it,” said Chloe, blushing, as I live; “she’s only known him for a month. But servants are expeditious as the wind in matters of the heart.”

  “Charles Reade: Hard Cash — yes. Well, it’s hard on us.”

  “But it’s very nice for them,” said my wife. “You ought to feel ever so much sympathy with lovers!”

  “I do,” said I, “especially when they are married and live in a house miles too big for them.”

  “Oh, Len,” she said, “are you really so very sorry for yourself?”

  “I am just as sorry for myself as you are for me.”

  “And I’m just as sorry for you as you can possibly be for yourself. Where had we got to?”

  “We had got to Mary’s marrying the baker, and your not minding being left without a servant because of your admiration for the beauty of constant love.”

  “Let’s go into the garden and finish talking about it.”

  “I could talk all day about love and constancy,” said I, “but my story—”

  “Bother the story!” said she, “and it’s not love I want to talk about, unless you can’t keep off the subject. It’s advertisements, and registry-offices, and Prosser.”

  So we went into the garden and talked.

  The garden chooses one’s subjects for one, and it would not listen to any of Chloe’s subjects. It was more tolerant of mine.

  V. THE LOAFERY

  I WAS writing in the red-and-white marble hall that morning — I really had made a beginning on the first of the six stories. It was not a good beginning, but there it was. I had reached page three, and knew that unless any domestic event more than commonly cataclysmic befell that day I should see the sun set on twelve pages of laborious type-writing.

  The walls of the marble hall are thick, and the windows look to the northeast, so that even when the sun is turning the garden to fine gold, and the westerly rooms to a burning, fiery furnace, the hall remains cool as a cave. Through the open door I could see the feathery flowers of the Spanish chestnut; through one window I could see the copper-beech, wine-dark, and through the other a gap in the avenue showed me a square of blue sky backing a single pillar of Normandy poplar, straight, slender, self- possessed. The garden was full of bird noises and the faint rustle of leaves. In the kitchen sounded the clink of silver — of electro-plate, to be more accurate — and the chime of china. The tapping of my Remington hardly did more than underline a silence which it might have broken to an ear that loved its monotonous music less than did mine.

  The hall is the great highway of the Red House. Chloe passed through now and then with duster and broom, with an armful of blue-frilled cushions, with a folded rug, with something that rattled in a covered waste-paper basket. She looked at me, and I knew she was wondering why I did not ask her what she was playing at. But I forbore, because I had reached the fourth page, and I dared not tempt fate by pausing to enjoy more deeply the charm of a life my right to which I ought, without doubt, even at that moment to be earning. Besides, I feared to break the spell. When once the fatal third page is passed fluency holds her own against ordinary attacks. Not against Chloe, if one allows her to begin to explain a new idea. Yet my fingers worked more slowly, and my full stops gave me time to count forty instead of four, as they tell us to do at school, just because I could not either resist or understand a growing im- impression pression that my wife did not want me to ask any questions. Had I felt that it would please her to be questioned. I could have wrestled with the definite temptation to please her, and have thrown it. As it was, my phrases grew feebler, my narrative less convincing. I had to clutch with both hands at my vanishing interest in my story; and when the struggle was over
I found that I had complicated the career of my hero with two wives, a dissipated youth, and a proposed highway robbery. And my hero was intended to shine in a milieu of “strong domestic interest.”

  I gathered the pages together; it was lunchtime. The blue and gold of the morning were overclouded with thick gray; the sky looked like the canvas roof of a travelling-circus tent. A few first drops made splashes on the door-step big as five-shilling pieces. Then down came the rain — straight, strong, masterful.

  “I knew it was going to rain,” said Chloe. “How good it is to hear it! Don’t you feel almost as glad of it as if you were a tree? Fancy standing up to it and holding out all your leaves to feel the splash of it!”

  “It makes work easier,” I said. “Now you can’t entice me away from my stories and tempt me to waste the golden hours in the garden.”

  “That’s the worst of this house,” she said—”everything inside it urges to industry. The white parlor is so proper, I never sit in it without feeling that I ought to be doing open-work embroidery, if not working a sampler. What heaps of work we shall do in the winter when there’s no dear garden to tempt us!”

  “I wonder—”

  It was Chloe who talked just then. I was trying to keep a few tentacles fixed on my story, and I was determined that I would ask no questions. After lunch I said:

  “Coffee?”

  “It’s not ready yet,” said she, rising. Then, “Len,” she said, abruptly, “I’ve got something to show you.”

  “ Not more rabbits?” I said, for only the week before it had been six baby rabbits that she had to show, found in our orchard, and painfully fed by Chloe, with the finger of a white kid glove dipped in warm milk. The rabbits had not lived.

  “No, no — how can you remind me of that? Come.”

  She led me up the oak stairs, along the gallery, and up a further narrower flight. We were among the nest of deserted rooms on the second floor. Chloe threw open a door, pulled me through, and shut it quickly.

  It was a large room, swept and cleaned; three long windows, curtained with cascades of Virginia-creeper, filled it with soft green twilight.

  There were no ornaments, there were no easy-chairs, there were no flowers and no carpets. Only one Persian rug on the floor, and a great divan, twelve or fourteen feet long, against one of the walls. On the shelves in the recesses by the fireplace were some thirty books, a large deal table held a solid inkstand, a smaller deal table held a brass tray with cups and tins. Two Windsor chairs stood against the big table.

  “Now I’ll make coffee,” she said, turning to the brass tray.

  “Coffee seems very flat. Is it possible that you aren’t going to satisfy my raging curiosity? What is this room?”

  “It’s the loafery,” she said. “In the winter, as you say, we shall need a place to loaf in.”

  “I didn’t say so.”

  “Yes, you did. Try the divan.”

  I did. It crackled when I sat down, but it was very comfortable.

  “Chloe,” I said, “come here!”

  “I can’t. I’m making the coffee.” And indeed she had lighted the spirit-lamp to that end.

  “Do you know that you are blushing as though you had been detected in pocket-picking, or in some generous act? Why are you embarrassed? Why are you shy? Why do you screen yourself behind a spirit-lamp? Why have you done this? And why don’t you rush into my arms as a dutiful wife should, and confess how you came to have such a beautiful idea?”

  “You do like it, then?”

  “Like it? I protest, by all my household gods, that if I had been a bachelor inhabiting this house, thus, and in no other way, should I have furnished my living-room!”

  “Why ‘if you were a bachelor’?”

  “Because my wife likes pretty things. She likes green Flemish pots, and brass warming-pans, and Sheffield-plate candlesticks, and flowers; and, as a husband, I like what she likes. Chloe, why are there no flowers here?”

  She pointed to the green screen of leaves at the window.

  I got up and began to walk up and down.

  “You’re a witch,” said I. “How did you know exactly what I liked? Here is space — nothing to knock down! And form — no curtains to break the fine lines of these old windows. And color — look at the green light; it’s like a fairy palace lighted by glowworm-lamps, especially when that gleam of sunlight came! Chloe, how did you know? Is it because you love me very much?”

  “Not in the least,” she said, briskly. “It’s because — Len, don’t laugh at me — I knew how to do the room because it’s what I like, too!”

  She had made the coffee and poured it out. Then she came and took my arm. Outside the rain pattered pleasantly on the green leaves and on the roof of the balcony.

  “That’s why I felt silly and why I blushed — only, of course, I never did blush. I seem to be turning into somebody else, and perhaps you won’t like me so much. Or I’m half myself and half somebody else, and I don’t know which half is really you. It didn’t cost anything, hardly,” she went on, irrelevantly. “The divan is only orange-boxes filled with straw, and covered with those old green curtains — you know — the ones that were so faded. And the table is out of the kitchen — the two shelves that pull out are quite enough there, Mary says. And that’s all.”

  We sat down among the blue-frilled cushions. “I bought the stuff for these, of course — the green twirlies on them just match the old curtains,” she said. “And that really is all.”

  “Honest Injun?” I said, severely.

  “Oh,” she said, tossing her head, “if you think I really did it to please you—”

  “But tell me, then,” I pleaded.

  “I don’t know,” she said, confusedly, resting her elbows on her knees and her head in her hands. “You see, the Red House is so big. It’s like Shakespeare or Goethe, and the Bandbox was like Savoy opera. And I hate mixing things up. And then it is so awful to have to dust things! Wasn’t it Thoreau who threw away his curios because he couldn’t be bothered to dust them? And Mary’s going, and I thought if one could have a room with just only what one needed — a lounge, a table, two chairs — we can put more books if you like. But I thought — if you would — we needn’t use it only for loafing; we could bring anything we liked here — work or anything; but I thought if you would agree never to leave anything here, but take everything away when we’d done it, whatever it was, then we should always have one room tidy — at least the untidiness would never be more than one day deep. It’s letting the litter of the days overlap that makes everything so hopeless. And I thought, perhaps, I should get some work done here.”

  “You are a genius,” I said, “and I am Prince Fortunate. I only regret one thing, and that is, that I did not think of it myself.”

  “If you had you wouldn’t have done it,” she said, quickly—”that’s just it. Because you thought I — and so I did — but — Anyway, you’re pleased?”

  “I am.”

  “The odd thing is that I think I must be two people, because if I had heaps of servants I should have the green pottery and brass and things in every room but this. Len, since we came to live here everything seems different. I feel as if I were swimming for my life in a great sea — nothing’s the same as I used to think it was.”

  “Nothing?”

  “Only us. I wonder if you understand—”

  “My dear,” I said, “we’ve tumbled out of our doll’s house into the real world.”

  “Oh no, this isn’t the real world — it’s too nice.”

  “Into a new world, then — a world where we have to think for ourselves and judge things on their merits. We’re like Columbus, madam. The really important thing is to find out for one’s self, without any sort of mistake, what are the things one cares about — the things that matter—”

  “And the things one doesn’t care about — those are much more important — the things one has just because other people have them — at least, if that’s not the re
ason I don’t know what is. And we’ve so much to learn, and there are so many good qualities I know nothing about. Don’t you feel very poor and unimportant, Len? And very, very ignorant? I do.”

  “I know one or two important things,” said I, for I never encourage Chloe in the moods of humility that end in self-reproaches, “and I have one or two unimportant possessions — the Red House, and a wife, and a loafery. See, the sun is coming out in earnest; how glorious it is through the green! Oh, it’s a good world, when all’s said and done! How thick the creeper grows. What does it hang by? Why, there are bars! This must have been the nursery.”

  “Yes,” said Chloe, leaning her chin on my shoulder, as she stood behind me.

  “It would make a splendid nursery, too,” said I.

  “Yes,” said my wife again, still with her chin on my shoulder. “Len, I feel very silly indeed, to-day; I should like to say something stupid.”

  “You couldn’t offer me a greater novelty.”

  She slipped her hand into my arm, and laid her cheek against my coat sleeve.

  “You know you thought it was so mad of me wanting to come to the Red House, but I saw these bars that very first day, and I thought how nice it would be for them to have a beautiful place to remember when they grow up. Not to remember the people next door, and organ-grinders, and gritty dust, and pavements, but quietness and big green trees and lawns, and this grave old house. Don’t you think it would be nice for them?”