Complete Novels of E Nesbit

by Edith Nesbit

  Hands were up.

  “Then I’ll go and get them.”

  She went into her house, leaving them awestruck. When she came back, a scuffle was just teaching its climax in the banging and locking of the little door.

  “All right, lidy,” several breathless voices assured her. “‘E pinched one of yer flowers, and we chucked ‘im aat!”

  “Thank you,” she said; “it’s kind of you to take care of my garden. But shall we let him come back? I don’t think he’ll pick any more.”

  Reluctantly they opened the gate.

  “She says you can come in again if you’ll keep your hands to yourself.”

  “I don’t want to come in,” he said. “Silly billy!” he added bitterly, and trailed away across the waste.

  But he came again the next Sunday when the rest of the boys, by special invitation, went to Malacca Wharf for what the Lady called another Biscuit Party.

  Thus did the Lady, partly by luck and partly by that incalculable thing we call personality, defend herself against the child-hooligans of the waste.

  It was after the second party that she told the tale to a friend of hers.

  “I really was rather frightened,” she said, “but I took the bull in both hands and tried loving my enemies — or, at any rate, acting as if I loved them. And then afterwards I found I really did. And they’re quite dears, some of them; and I’m going to have biscuit parties once a week. I can’t afford real tea-parties. And you and some of the others might come down sometimes, and help me play with them. Why have I gone to live there? I thought you knew. Oh! I forgot; you’ve been in Cornwall all the while, haven’t you? Well, I’ve been coming of age, and then they told me what my little bit of money comes from. It’s rents in the East End. And Malacca is part of my property, only it won’t let. So I thought I’d live there and save rent. I’ve been waiting for you to come back, to have my house-warming.”

  “It isn’t safe,” said the friend, crumbling his bread. They were dining at a little restaurant in Soho. “You oughtn’t to live there alone.”

  “I’m not alone,” she said. “I’ve got a lovely charhag. She has the loveliest voice. She used to sing in the streets. She happened to be out that day, but she’s a tower of strength, really.”

  “She can’t defend you from big hooligans,” he said. “You don’t know what those East End roughs are.”

  “Well, never mind,” she said comfortably, “come to my house-warming and see my little hooligans. Thank you, Alphonse, one mille-feuille and one petit suisse.”

  She smiled on the waiter as she had smiled on the boys.

  “Every one’s moving,” said her friend. “Sullivan’s going to America, and Anthony’s got the kick-out from his place. Can’t stand the smells. I warned him they wouldn’t. Why do chemists always insist on using the drugs that are stenches? They must know before they begin what the things in the bottles smell like.”

  “Where’s he going?” she asked, ignoring the more abstruse question.

  “I don’t know. Can’t find any one who’ll have him. His candid nature compels him. He can’t exaggerate the smells, but I believe he would if he could — in the service of truth.”

  “Will he ever find out anything?” she asked.

  “Yes, lots of things. Whether they’ll be what he wants...”

  “What sort of place does he want?”

  “Oh! big, and no questions asked — and cheap. That sort of place doesn’t go begging. Have some coffee?”

  “Please — white coffee. No, that sort of place doesn’t,” she said thoughtfully.

  “If you’re going straight home,” he said, after the coffee, “I’ll see you there. May I? And walk back. I want a walk.”

  When coffee was over, he paid his reckoning, she hers. For this was not an assignation dinner, but a mere chance rencounter at a little French eating-house where, that night, no other of the friends of either happened to be. The reckoning paid, he saw her home, to the house on the creek in the far east, by the ugliest of the many ugly lines that worm their dirty way out of London. Both were thoughtful. He walked home.

  On the next Sunday the little hooligans were dazzled by two more lidies and four gents, who taught them new and wonderful games, and played with them.

  When the party had culminated in biscuits and the ragged guests gone, the Lady in blue took her friends to see her little house and her big studio — the top floor of the warehouse on the far side of the inner court. It was reached by an outside stairway of stone that ran up the side of the building.

  And all her friends admired everything very much. Especially Anthony Drelincourt.

  “I wish I could find a place like this,” he told her, as he and she came down the stairs after the others.

  “There are two floors below and a basement,” she said. “You could have either or both or all three.”

  “Do you mean it?” he said eagerly. “It’s the ideal place. But I should be in your way. And the rent. Couldn’t afford it.”

  “If I don’t let it to a friend, I shan’t let it to any one,” she said shortly; “ and you wouldn’t be in my way. There’s an inner staircase to the other two floors. We needn’t see each other even, if we don’t want to.”

  “Are you sure?” he asked.

  And she laughed. “Of course I’m sure,” she said.

  “What is the rent?” he asked.

  “Fifteen pounds a year,” she said, since that was what he paid for the attic he was leaving. “Fifteen pounds and nothing found.”

  “I could get the gas laid on?”

  “Of course. There is water laid on.”

  “I will, then. It’s jolly decent of you, Rose. Sure I won’t be a nuisance.”

  “When you’ve set the Thames on fire with your great discovery, and they are all writing your biography, they’ll say, ‘ His landlady was called Rose Royal. ‘“

  “And when you’ve set the Thames on fire with your pictures, they’ll write,’ She had a tenant called Anthony Drelincourt.’”

  When Rose announced the tenancy to William Bats, he said, “Oh!” and then, after a quite perceptible pause, “so now you’ll have some one to see you home occasionally. That’s all right. And a man within call. Get him to fix a telephone between your place and his.”

  “Nonsense!” said Rose. But before he had been in the place a week the telephone was fixed.

  And now all that was nearly a year ago. For a year these two earnestly unconventional young people had been neighbours in that far eastern country. He had not been in her way. But she had found it necessary to exert her will to keep out of his. She bought an old, round-nosed punt for thirty-five shillings, because she knew it would amuse him to paddle about in it, and tried not to be in sight whenever he stooped to loosen it from its moorings. She lent him her charwoman, and would have lent or given him almost anything else. But he never asked for anything else.

  And now the cold, yellow, foggy light of a March dawn shines upon Miss Royal going across the large courtyard with something in each hand — something which she carries carefully. She sets the things down at the door of the warehouse, takes out a little key and opens the door, goes in, and shuts it. A few minutes later she comes out, and goes quietly and quickly back to her little square house with the muslin-and-geranium windows.

  Anthony Drelincourt had made himself a nest of such materials as his kind uses for nest-building. The ground floor he kept locked always. No one but himself ever went in, and no one knew for certain what he did there. Most of the big first floor of the warehouse, with its row of grey, uncurtained, unshuttered windows, was sheer laboratory, with the usual medley of bright porcelain and glass. Two large distilling flasks, holding bright-coloured liquids, formed, with their condensers and receiving flasks, an imposing group; and, together with a large filter full of dubious-looking mess, plainly said “organic chemist” to any well-informed observer. To Rose they simply said, “Anthony as usual.” A small, dirty, copper oven stood as
a sort of connecting link to the oddly domestic-looking saucepans and cake-tins which make such good water-baths. Shelves of labelled bottles, clean test tubes and dirty test tubes, a few stray dry cells and accumulators, a few odd tools scattered about, bits of insulated wire, cork-borers and corks, made a harmonious background.

  A large square table, covered with papers, was under one window. Under another the microscope had a little table to its brassy self. On a third a bright balance glittered attractively. In one corner a little room stood out; it had been a counting-house in the days when Malacca Wharf was a wharf, not a derelict. This room, with the space near it, surrounding the fireplace, and in, but not of, the laboratory proper, was a sort of shabby oasis furnished with odd jetsam from the domestic life of an age not his — a lady’s silk welled work-table, a prie-Dieu chair with lilies worked on it in beads, a tall, crimson banner-screen, two gilded Empire chairs, a round table of papier-maché, lacquered with golden birds, that stood upright like a great black and yellow sunflower, a shelf of crockery, another of pots and pans, a worn Aubusson carpet, once of delicate beauty, and, against the wall, shelves and shelves of books.

  The light grew. But it was still twilight in the quiet laboratory when Anthony came in from his bedroom in his dressing-gown to light the fire, so that the kettle should be boiling by the time he had dressed and shaved.

  He reached for the matches, which should have been on the little work-table. He did not find them. Instead, his hand struck against something cold and unfamiliar which fell over with a crash, and something cold and wet flooded his hand and the table. He said something, and fetched the matches from his bedroom. His lamp, lighted quickly, showed him that he had upset a tall, straight, green vase in which two red roses had been standing. They lay on the floor now among a shining shatter of glass, and table and carpet were drenched with the water from the vase. A squat pot full of violets had escaped, and stood solidly. A drowned white thing caught his eye. It was a paper on which he read the words —

  “Happy birthday. R. R.”

  “Oh, bother the girl!” said Anthony, as he mopped up the water.

  It was not till after breakfast that he began to feel how kind it was of her. He wrote a little note.

  “A thousand thanks! How do you manage always to think of such pretty things and such pretty ways of doing them? I thought the fairies had been here. But it was only you.”

  Fortunately he read this over, and changed the ending to—”I thought a good fairy had been here. And I was right.”

  Which was much better.

  You do not know what any of these people looked like. You shall quite soon, now. Myself, I never want to know what people look like until I know where they live, and what they do and say and think, and whether they are rich or poor. Nobody has done or said or thought much so far, but, at any rate, we know where Rose Royal lives, and that she has a wharf and an income. And we know where Anthony Drelincourt lives; but even he himself never could estimate his income, which, with his expenditure, varied too much to be estimable. Anyhow he was very poor. And Rose Royal was much too poor to be buying red roses at a shilling apiece and round-nosed punts at thirty-five shillings. She had not, however, spent the last of her month’s money on the violets and the red roses. She proposed to spend some of the rest on things to eat for a party she was going to that night. And some she meant to spend on a real birthday present for her tenant. The roses and violets, in her opinion, were not real presents.

  “I wish,” she said, throwing down her palette after a hopeless morning, “that I had a thousand pounds. Then I could buy something worth giving to a person. Roses and rubbish! It’s hateful to be poor. When I give a present I should like it to be a present that there isn’t another of in the world. And there are thousands and millions of any of the sort of things that I can afford to buy for any one. And I wish,” she added, still more fervently, “that it didn’t always rain whenever I want it not to. I think it’s going to stop,” she said, flattening her nose against the grey square of window, “only I know it isn’t.”

  It wasn’t.

  CHAPTER II. A BOOK LIKE ANOTHER

  YOU know Charlotte Street, Fitzroy Square. It is not a pretty street, and on a wet day it is of course uglier than ever. The rain came straight down and steady, without pause, for it had its work to do — and without haste, for there was plenty of time to do it in. Most of the foot passengers appeared merely as trousers or skirts surmounted by umbrellas.

  Inside the entries of those Swiss boarding-houses where young waiters wait, desiring situations and sinking day by day more deeply into the patron’s debt, groups of anæmic, unshaved youths watched with dull eyes the stream of sordid traffic, and talked in strange tongues of unemployment and the English climate. From out these doorways rank cigarette smoke eddied into the rain, and with it came intermittent weary criticism of the passers-by. These English — they were sad, they were stupid, they were unintelligent, everything which the Swiss exile from Swiss scenery esteemed himself as not being.

  “And the women,” said a lank man, with oily hair and a long yellow face. “Women? Camels!”

  Their eyes — like blue porcelain.”

  “Their hands — like hams for largeness.”

  “Their feet — like the foot of elephant.”

  “Their teeth — as is one who has swallowed a pianoforte not completely.”

  So arose the chorus of detraction, justified, perhaps, by the thin stream of worn-out working women that trickled along Charlotte Street towards those strange courts which hide in the square bounded by Goodge Street, Howland Street, and the Tottenham Court Road.

  “Since I am here — ten interminable days,” a pinkfaced, square-faced boy went on, shrugging round, broad shoulders, “I see not one woman that one may call a woman, that is not French or Swiss or German. Thou hast reason. The Englishwomen are camels, and the reason...”

  “But hold,” the yellow-faced lounger interrupted, resettling his hat at an alluring angle—”en voici une for example.”

  A thrill of self-consciousness electrified the languid group. It was like seeing dogs prick up their ears. And all eyes turned to where, between black mud and grey sky, came a young woman, who trod the pavement with the freedom of a boy and the assurance of a maiden goddess. Her skirts were short and straight — none of that flow and draggle and dip that Goodge Street knows so well — and skirt as well as coat was of brown corduroy. A three-cornered hat of brown felt was set firmly on coils of black hair, and the rain had lit to radiance that skin of white and rose which belongs to Irish eyes. The girl looked about her as she went, with no roving weakness, but with a keen interest and observation. Her hands were bare, slender, and pink in the rain, and they held many parcels.

  The pink-faced youth spat reflectively.

  “The first,” he said, “ the first I see who is worthy a thought from a son of Helvetia.”

  “Almost I follow her,” said the yellow-faced man, “yet no. It is not worth the trouble. Nothing is worth the trouble in this land abominable. Yet she has charm — I tell it you — I, Achille.”

  “You have not the courage to say her good-day,” said an under-sized, dark boy, frowning. “Why vaunt yourself? You are a waiter. And she is a queen.”

  “Thou sayest?” The yellow-faced Achille plumed himself like a bantam cock. “Thou shalt see. If she repasses by here, I address her the speech. Do I not? For vingt centimes.”

  “I bet you cinquante you dare not,” said the boy, who was an ugly boy with large ears, “and if you win the cinquant centimes, I pay. Also I fight.”

  A roar of laughter went up, laughter without beauty, without mirth, the ugly laughter of ugly souls who laugh at the real things of life.

  “The little Sebastien! Behold him at last épris! See she has entered Vandenhauten’s. She goes to buy the patisserie for the noces with the gentil petit Sebastien.”

  Sebastien drew into his jacket and seemed to grow smaller. He hoped she would not come bac
k that way. He hoped he should not have to fight Achille. He hoped he should win Achille’s fifty centimes. He hoped many things.

  -The girl in the brown dress and the Napoleon hat came out of Vandenhauten’s, and the parcels she carried were more than ever. She stood a moment undecided, and in that moment Sebastien found time to put up a prayer to his patron saint. He was young, and was not long from home; to him his patron saint was still a force that ill-doers had to reckon with. Also he confusedly implored the consideration of Saint Agnes and Saint Ursula, so evidently the lady’s patrons, to turn the lady’s steps in any direction other than that of the Hôtel Simplon.

  The saints seldom answer a prayer as one answers a request for bread and butter. There is always a little subtlety about the saints. The boy got what he wished — and not what he asked for.

  She turned and came back along the pavement. The yellow Achille pulled up his collar and ran fat yellow fingers through the oily black curls above his ears. Sebastien trembled, and wondered how it felt to carry a knife in one’s waistbelt, over the right hip, as some men did.

  And the girl came on, unconscious, nearer, nearer. Now she was almost opposite the door, and Achille made a half step forward. Sebastien caught at his arm.

  But the saints had not been idle; their unseen fingers no doubt had been busy with the strings of all these parcels, and that was why, at this very moment of all moments, something gave way among the parcels and half of them fell and clattered and slid on the slimy pavement of Charlotte Street.

  Sebastien was first. He had picked up the square Vandenhauten box, and the packet that felt like charcuterie, before the others were there, quite wordless, but enthusiastically helpful, picking up the brown paper packets, wiping the mud from them, and restoring them, with every manifestation of respectful regret, to their owner. Sebastien picked up the last parcel as well as the first, and as he gave it to her his fingers touched hers. It was an accident. Or did the saints throw it in as a make-weight?