Complete Novels of E Nesbit

by Edith Nesbit

  “Is it soldiers?” he asked with his eyes shut. “ No, dear.”

  “Not marbles?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Then I don’t see what it can be. I’ve thought of everything,” he said, through the towel. “ Not quite.”

  “It isn’t books?”

  “No. Now your handies.”

  “Not a model farm?”

  “You’ve got that.”

  “Do tell me. No, don’t tell me. I will guess.”

  But the evening toilet was completed, and the gas was lowered to a blue bead, and Mother was gone down to her supper. And still he had not guessed.

  And now he lay alone in the darkened room wondering, and the wonder made his head ache and his hands hot, and bed was not the comfortable place it had been.

  “I’m sure it’s making me feverish,” he told himself. “ Mother wouldn’t like me to be feverish. And I mustn’t be selfish and disturb her at her meals. Gwendolen said so.”

  He sat up in the bed and listened. There was no sound in the house except the faint swish of Gwendolen’s scrubbing brush on the kitchen floor. She was late with her work that night, because she had sat with him while Mother was out.

  “I’ll just take one little feel,” he said, and got out of bed. His legs felt soft and tingly, and it was difficult to stand up straight, but he held on to the bedpost, and got to the chest of drawers. He felt the parcel. There was a box in it. Beyond doubt a box. He tore the paper at the corner. A wooden shiny box. Parlour croquet, perhaps?

  He pulled the box towards him, and the medicine bottle fell over softly on a pile of clean handkerchiefs. He pulled the box to the edge, and it fell heavily into his arms. He only just saved it from falling noisily on to the floor, and stood swaying and hugging it to him.

  “I believe it’s carving tools,” said he, and reeled back with it to the bed. He had to lie there quietly for a few minutes, the sharp angles of the box running into side and arm, before he had strength to sit up and tear off the paper.

  “I’ll tell Mother when she comes up,” he said. “She won’t mind if I tell her I couldn’t bear the suspense.”

  The paper, scrabbled off by hot eager fingers, disclosed a polished wooden case. It had doors in the front that opened like the ones of stationery cabinets. Inside was much stuffing, tiny shavings, tow and tissue paper wrappings. Inside one of the doors a card, nailed at the corners. “The Young Chemists Practical Cabinet,” it said; “ Contains Sixty Different Chemicals, with full instructions for use. With pestle and mortar.”... He read no more, but began pulling the packets out.

  There were little bottles and pill-boxes, and round wooden boxes, all neatly labelled. “ Sulphate of Copper,” they said, and “Chromate of Potash,” and “Alum,” and interesting words like that. And there were little bottles which said the same sort of things in the same sort of language — a new and beautiful language, but to Tony, as yet, a foreign one. There was a pestle and mortar, and a graduated glass, and a little pair of wire tweezers, and a little pair of scales with tiny weights in tissue paper inside a pill-box, and there was one test-tube.

  The things lay over the bed all mixed up with the tow, and Tony took up the blue-covered book of “ full instructions.” Most of the instructions seemed difficult. But there was one: “ If a piece of camphor be placed in a basin of pure water, and then ignited, it will dart about as though alive. If a drop of oil be placed in the water, the motion of the camphor will immediately cease.”

  “I could try that,” said Tony. “ I saw camphor just now.” He found the camphor in its pink and white pill-box, and there were matches....

  He drew himself from the bed as a dagger is drawn from the sheath, so as not to disturb the lovely freight of his counterpane, and stood on the mat beside. He reached the matches from the mantelpiece near his bed-head.

  “I will light the camphor first,” he said, “and then take it to the basin.”

  So he lighted the camphor, and it flared up with instant magnificence and burnt his fingers, so that he screamed and threw it from him. It fell among the tow and shavings on the bed, and instantly it was a bed of flames, that leaped up and hotly licked his face, and neck, and hands.

  His mother was there before the echo of his scream had died away, and she and Gwendolen put the fire out. And Anthony’s burns were not very bad ones. But his mother would not buy him another Chemical Cabinet. Only when he first saw the laboratory at St. Edward’s he felt curiously at home. He had seen these sort of things before. And the mischief was done. That box had implanted in him the seed of an imperishable desire to mess about with chemicals. And the book that his schoolmistress sent for his birthday held another seed, from which grew another life-purpose, intertwining for ever with the first, sometimes overgrown by the strong tendrils and heavy leaves of scientific attainments, but every now and then unfolding in the midst of all the things that everybody saw, sudden starry flowers that no one else could see. If that second life-purpose could ever have been imagined by the masters and professors who assisted in the development of the first, I don’t know what would have happened. Probably some well-meaning person would have tried to persuade his mother to place him in a home for the mentally afflicted. But he kept his secret, even from his mother, even, later, from Bats. He knew from the first, quite inexplicably and quite surely, that no one else would believe in it. He believed in it. Children have so many strange new things to believe, things that grown-ups tell them, about China and Peru, botany and geology, and the births of religions and the deaths of kings, that to believe a few things more, comes, as it were, in the day’s work. And as he grew older and perceived that things are not necessarily true because they are in printed books, it seemed to him that that secret belief of his was no more dreamlike and wonderful than the things they taught him about radium and electrons, and polarised light, and all the things that to the unscientific sound so like incredible fairy tales. The book the schoolmistress had sent was a book called something-or-other Magic — not for years did Anthony recall its real name — and it ought to have been a book called Natural Magic — a nice little childish book about birds’ eggs and spiders’ webs, and the respectable conduct of the ant. Only it wasn’t. By some error of the bookseller it was this other book. And before the error was discovered and rectified by the authorities, there had been born in the little Anthony a deep unassuageable desire, an almost ignorance that there was no ignoring, a longing beyond all mundane longings, for... what that book talked about. Beautiful things that you didn’t understand at all, but that made you think of other things. It was a wonderful book that made even sums interesting. Can one put the fascination more strongly? A book that made one long for it to be Revelations and not anything else for the second lesson in Church; that set one to reading one’s Bible in a way that made one’s mother weep tears of joy, pious and amazed; that lit the stars anew, and put new names to the dullest words, new crowns to the simplest numbers.

  He had done wonders on the scientific side at St. Edward’s School, and when he left with a scholarship for University College, old Mug, the Headmaster, made him a little pleasant speech about Fame and Newton, and Faraday and original work and natural aptitude, a speech so flattering that he could never have repeated it to any one except his mother. But his mother was dead.

  He thought of that year after his mother’s death, and before his scholarship at University College. There had been another scholarship, a travelling one. And he had travelled, straight to a place that later, in the rush and tumble of his student life, he had not dared to think of — had only felt as one feels a hand in the dark. A quite ordinary place, a whitewashed villa in a little French town near the forest of Fontainebleau, with a walled garden above whose gate wistaria drooped, faintly purple like grapes in a dream, much sunlight, green shutters, the splendour and mystery of the forest, world-old rocks and world-old secrets, the disciple who inquired, the Master who knew.

  Then came University College and hard f
acts, physics, mathematics, chemistry, life transfigured. And the call of the blood, recognized consciously and consciously not responded to. And the outside veneer of a life that was like acting a charade. And the steady purpose maturing, the growth of the idea, the development of the invention, the unfolding, leaf by leaf, of the wonder-flower of the world. Anthony felt that he was not one, but two; the physicist-chemist - mathematician, and that other thing that refused to be tied down and bound by a name. Also he was another thing — not a duad, but a triad. There was in him, deep and desperate, the desire to be as other men, to rejoice in their joys, grieve as they grieved. He summoned up the third Anthony when he said once to Bats —

  “If I could only see what you fellows see in these actresses and people, I shouldn’t mind. But I can’t.”

  “Neither can I,” said Bats. “At least I can. But I don’t want to see any more.”

  “That’s just it,” said Anthony. “I don’t see. And I wish I could.”

  He remembered all this now, as he sat staring out of the window of his third-class carriage at the woods and fields, pale in the March sunshine. He had the carriage to himself, and he remembered many things in that noisy quiet. He remembered his mother — little, thin, energetic, with bright eyes and smooth, hard, gentle, busy, little hands; and he understood just a little of the love that had wrapped the child round (as precious things are folded in cotton wool) to keep away all hard things that might hurt.

  “I wish you were here,” he said aloud. “I hope you won’t mind what I’m doing. I hope that if you do mind, something will happen to prevent my finding out anything that you don’t want me to know.”

  He often spoke to her. It seemed to him impossible that the love that had made so soft a nest should now have either ceased to be, or should be where it could no longer reach him.

  “I don’t believe in death, you see,” he said once to Bats. “Things change, but they don’t cease to be. And some things don’t change: it’s the surroundings that change. You don’t persuade me that if you get near enough to people to love them, and go on loving them till you die, that then your love’s turned off like a tap. I’m not at all sure that dead people don’t stay near the people they love. You can’t prove that they don’t.”

  “I can’t prove that you’re a morbid ass,” Bats answered, “and I don’t need to. I should have thought that your scientific rot would have knocked all that rot out of your head.”

  “And this from one who can believe as many as six impossible things about Bacon and Shakespeare before breakfast! But why expect anything from a Baconian but a grunt?”

  “And now you’re coarse, and not even original. That’s the kind of joke that all the Shakespearians like and the kind of argument they use.”

  “But what I said about dead people was true, and you can’t prove it isn’t. You modern people think you know everything about life and death. Your old Francis wouldn’t have been so cocksure.”

  “I’m an awkward idiot,” said Bats, answering something that was not the other’s speech. But all that had happened years ago.

  Anthony had found out many things since then, things old and new; and now he was alone in the train, going perhaps to find out something very new indeed. He looked out across the grey green fields, where little old farm buildings lay humped up under leafless trees. The quiet and peace of the country reached out to him, and he wondered half wistfully how it would have been with him if his grandfather, the Sussex farmer, had not died in the hunting field. Would he have been brought up on the farm, to order the sowing and the reaping, and think only of the condition of beasts and the rotation of crops. He would have ridden to hounds like his grandfather, and come home tired and splashed to take off his muddy boots in the firelit farm-kitchen. Would he have ever wanted anything, not better but different? Would he have longed so to “find out” if it had not been for the box of mystery from the toy-shop?

  “I think I should,” he said. “I think it’s like a fire in my blood. Something would have lighted the fire and set it blazing. Ah!”

  A thrill ran through him; the train had swung round a curve, and a great shoulder of Down rose vast and quiet before his eyes. He looked, and loved it.

  “And that’s in my blood, too,” he said, remembering that somewhere on those South Downs was the farm where his mother was born, and where, but for the stumble of a horse at a hedge, he might have lived his own life. He did not know where that farm was. She had never told him.

  If he had been a farmer he would have married. He thought of the firelit farm-kitchen again, a woman coming in to put her arms round his neck, and ask if they had had a good run — a woman gentle, darkeyed, fragile, enchanting, as no woman was that he had ever met.

  No, a farmer’s wife would have had to be energetic, vital, managing and organizing, a woman like Rose Royal. Then he thought of her for a little while. “Well, anyway I couldn’t afford to marry any one now,” he told himself, “even if—”and stopped the thought there.

  And then it was Lewes, and he was out of the train and beholding the full revelation of great curves and chalk cuttings, the massive splendour of the Down country.

  He asked a porter the way to the office of Messrs. Wigram & Bucks, and went out into the streets. A girl fleeting by on a bicycle slowed down a little to look at him, and thought that he looked very sad, and that if a really nice girl were to be fond of him she could make a great difference in his life. This was exactly what every girl thought who ever came near enough to him to see his eyes. But the girl on the bicycle did not know this. She went by slowly, and even looked back at him, which is “not done,” and her bicycle swerved and ran over a stone, and she nearly fell off. So she said, “Serve me right,” and went on quickly, feeling hot and uncomfortable.

  “What a fool he’ll think me,” she told herself. But he had not even seen her.

  One lawyer’s office is very like another — the same smell of dusty leather, the same posters which, at the first glance, look like play-bills, but which really deal, not with the details of the drama, but with the sale of acres and stock and estates and messuages.

  There is the same very young clerk, casual to exasperation, the same delay, the same certainty that the man you have come to see will have gone out to lunch.

  Anthony had to wait, and through a partly-opened door he got a glimpse of Turkey carpet, roll-topped desk, and black tin boxes that had Drelincourt Estate on them in white letters.

  “So it is my father’s people,” he told himself, and hated the thought of what he might have to hear. He imagined a repentant father providing on his death-bed for the son of the woman his youth had wronged. Anthony ground his teeth, and the clerk offered him the Lewes Gazette. Perhaps — his eyes occupied with its advertisement columns — his thoughts were still free, but he called them back and chained them to the leading article. He had finished this as well as the reports of a Conservative meeting, a bazaar, and the fire in the High Street, before the door swung open, and portly, frock-coated, high-hatted, a presence appeared in the doorway, passed Anthony with unseeing eyes, and disappeared into the inner room. The small clerk, alacritously obsequious, followed. There was a subdued murmur, the door was flung back, and Anthony, requested to step this way, stepped, “Mr. Drelincourt, sir,” said the small clerk, and went out, shutting the door, almost.

  “Take a seat, Mr. Drelincourt,” said the august frock-coated one, got up from the chair, and closed the door quite.

  Anthony took the client’s chair facing the light by the roll-topped desk, and looked across its angle at the large calm face of the solicitor who was rearranging papers on his desk. There was a silence. Anthony did not like his reception. He felt as might one who has been invited to dinner, and whose hostess should meet him with a tacit inquiry as to what had procured her this unexpected pleasure. So he broke the silence, and broke it curtly.

  “I am here in response to your advertisement,” he said.

  “Quite so, quite so,” sai
d the solicitor, still arranging his papers.

  There was another silence. Anthony rose.

  “You seem to be busy,” he said; “please don’t trouble to explain why you advertised. Good morning.”

  Mr. Wigram looked at him over his spectacles, and said —

  “All in good time, Mr. Drelincourt. Pray resume your seat. I have here a paper of notes which concerns the matter in hand. Ah! here it is.”

  Anthony sat down again, abashed by portly superiority.

  “Ah, yes. Quite so. I advertised for Anthony Drelincourt. That is your name?”

  “Yes,” said Anthony.

  “The name of your mother?”

  “Why do you want to know that?”

  The solicitor raised fine eyebrows.

  “The name of your father, then?”

  “Before I tell you anything, I must know why you want to know.”

  “And before I tell you anything,” said Mr. Wigram, laying down the papers with an air of finality, “you must give me some guarantee that you are the person whom you represent yourself to be. Have you your birth certificate? The certificate of the marriage of your parents? Any letters or mementoes of your parents to prove your identity?”

  “I have no intention,” said Drelincourt deliberately, “of telling you anything until you have told me your reason for advertising.”

  “It is,” said the lawyer, “something to your advantage, if you are the person for whom we advertised.”

  “Our ideas of advantage may not be identical,” said Anthony.

  “It is a question of property,” said Mr. Wigram.

  “Quite so,” said Anthony, “and if you feel that you are doing your duty by advertising for me, and then refusing me any information when I call upon you, well — you and your conscience must settle it between you.”

  “Come, come, Mr. Drelincourt,” the lawyer spoke with some warmth, “you cannot expect me to confide family secrets to you until you have shown me that you are a member of the family.”