Complete Novels of E Nesbit

by Edith Nesbit

  The first American edition

  CONTENTS

  I. THE BEGINNING

  II. MAKING AN AEROPLANE

  III. EDEN

  IV. THE SOUTH DOWNS

  V. LA MANCHE

  VI. CROW’S NEST

  VII. TUNBRIDGE WELLS

  VIII. THE ROAD TO ——

  IX. THE MEDWAY

  X. OAK WEIR LOCK

  XI. THE GUILDHALL

  XII. WESTMINSTER

  XIII. WARWICK

  XIV. STRATFORD-ON-AVON

  XV. KENILWORTH

  XVI. CAERNARVON

  XVII. LLANBERIS

  XVIII. LONDON

  XIX. HURSTMONCEAUX

  XX. THE END

  The original frontispiece

  I. THE BEGINNING

  TO understand this story you will have to believe in the Greater Gods — Love and Youth, for example, and Adventure and Coincidence; also in the trusting heart of woman and the deceitful spirit of man. You will have to reconcile yourself to the fact that though daily you go to London by the nine-seven, returning by the five-fifteen, and have your accustomed meals at eight, one, and half-past six, there are those who take neither trains nor meals regularly. That, while nothing on earth ever happens to you, there really are on earth people to whom things do happen. Nor is the possibility of such happenings wholly a matter of the independent income — the income for which you do not work. It is a matter of the individual soul. I knew a man whose parents had placed him in that paralyzing sort of situation which is symbolized by the regular trains and the regular meals. It was quite a nice situation for some people, a situation, too, in which one was certain to “get on.” But the man I knew had other dreams. He chucked his job, one fine Saturday morning in May, went for a long walk, met a tinker and bought his outfit — a wheel on wheels, a sort of barrow with a grindstone on it, and a pot for putting fire in dangling underneath. This he wheeled profitably through rural districts — so profitably that he was presently able to buy a donkey and a cart, and to sell kettles as well as mend them. He has since bought a gipsy tent; with these impediments — or helps — he travels through the pleasant country. Things are always happening to him. He has found a buried treasure; frustrated a burglary; once he rescued a lady in distress; and another time he killed a man. The background to these dramatic incidents is always the pleasant background of quiet road, blossoming hedgerows and orchards, corn-fields and meadows and lanes. He says this is the way to live. I will write down his story some day, but this is not it. I only bring him in to illustrate my point, which is that adventures do happen — to the adventurous.

  My friend the tinker has had, perhaps, more than his share of adventures, but then his is the temperament that shoots, like a willing needle, to the great magnet of melodrama. The temperamental needle of Edward Basingstoke followed the magnet of romance. In a gayer, if less comfortable, age he might have been a knight-errant, or, at least, the sympathetic squire of a knight-errant. Had he been born in the days when most people stayed at home and minded their own business he would have insisted on going out and minding other people’s. Living in the days of aeroplanes, motors, telegraphy, and cinematographs, in a world noisy with the nonsense of politics and the press, he told himself that the ideal life was the life of the farmer who plowed and sowed and reaped, tended his beasts and filled his barns, and went home from his clean, quiet work to the open hearth whence the wood smoke curled up to heaven like the smoke of an altar.

  Destiny, in deep perversity, was making an engineer of him. He dreamed his pastoral dreams in the deafening clangor of the shops at Crewe, but not ten thousand hammers could beat out of his brain the faith that life was really — little as one might suppose it, just looking at it from Crewe — full of the most beautiful and delicate possibilities, and that, somehow or other, people got from life what they chose to take. While he was making up his mind what he should take, he went on learning his trade. And Destiny seemed determined that he should learn nothing else. What we call Destiny is really Chance — and so far from being immutable, she is the veriest flirt and weathercock. She changed her mind about Edward — or perhaps Death, who is stronger than she, insisted and prevailed.

  Just at the time when a faint dust was beginning to settle on his dreams — the sort of dust that thickens and hardens into clay and you grow cabbages in it — Death intervened to save him. It was his uncle who died, and he left a will, and by that will certain property came to Edward. When the news came he took a day to think of it, and he went to the works as usual that afternoon and the next morning. But next day at noon he laid down his tools and never took them up again. Instead he took a ticket to Oxford, appeared at the rooms of his friend, whom he surprised in slumber, and told his tale.

  “And you’re going to chuck the shop,” said the friend, whose name was Vernon Martingale, and his father a baronet.

  “I have chucked the shop,” said Edward. “I chucked it at Fate as you might throw a stone at a dog. And that reminds me — I want a dog. Do you know of a nice dog — intelligent, good manners, self-respecting, and worthy?”

  “Any particular breed?”

  “Certainly not. These researches into family history are in the worst possible taste. You don’t love me for my pedigree. Why should I love my dog for his?”

  “I suppose you want some tea, anyhow,” said Martingale.

  So they had tea, and talked cricket.

  “Any idea what you mean to do?” Martingale asked several times, and at last Edward answered him.

  “What I mean to do,” he said, “is what I always meant to do. I mean to be a farmer, and hunt, and shoot, and grow flowers. I think I shall specialize on sunflowers. They’re so satisfying.”

  “More than you are,” said Vernon. “Mean to say you’re going to buy a farm and ruin yourself the moment you’ve got a few half-crowns to ruin yourself with?”

  “I am going to be a farmer,” said Basingstoke, “but first I am going to see life.”

  “Life? But you were always so. . . .”

  “I mean that” — Edward indicated the sunshine outside—”not getting drunk and being disreputable. I can’t think why the deuce-dickens that sort of beastliness is always called seeing life. As if life were all gas, and wining, and electric light, and the things you don’t talk about before ladies. No, my boy, I’m going out into the unknown — not into the night, because it happens to be afternoon — and I thought I’d just come and clasp that hand and gaze once into those eyes before I set my foot on the untrodden path of adventure. Farewell, Vernon of Martingale, good knight and true! Who knows when we shall meet again?”

  “I don’t, anyhow,” said Vernon, “and that’s why you’re not going till the day after to-morrow, and why I insist on knowing what you mean by seeing life — and why you’re going to stay till to-morrow, anyhow.”

  “Heaven forbid that I should criticize another man’s tastes,” Edward sighed, “or deprive him of any innocent enjoyment. If you want me to stay — well, I’ll stay — till to-morrow. And as for what I mean by seeing life — well, I should have thought even you would have understood that. I’m going to get a stick, and a knapsack, and a dog, and a different kind of hat, and some very large boots with nails, and a new suit, only I shall wear it all night before I wear it all day. Oh, Vernon, can’t you guess my simple secret?”

  “He calls a walking-tour seeing life!” Vernon pointed out. “And who’s going with you and where are you going? The Hartz Mountains? — the Carpathians? — Margate? — Trouville? What?”

  “The person who is going with me,” said Edward, “is the dog whom we haven’t yet bought. Come along out and buy him. As to where I’m going, I shall follow the most ancient of sign-posts — and I know that I can’t go wrong.”

  “You will follow—”

  “My nose,” Edward explained, kindly —

  “That indicator of the place to be,

  The Heaven-sent guide to beauty and to thee.

  �
��Do you know, if you talk rot to the chaps at the works they try to understand what you mean. Like Scotchmen, you know. They think they can understand anything, no matter how shallow. Now I will say for you that you know your limitations. Let’s buy the dog, my son, and get a canoe.”

  They did. And the dog upset the canoe.

  II. MAKING AN AEROPLANE

  THE Five Bells was asleep; asleep, at least, was the face with which it met the world. In the brick-floored kitchen, out of sight and hearing of the road, the maid was singing as she sluiced the bricks with a white mop; but if she and her mop had been state secrets, matters of life and death, they could not have been more safely hidden from any chance passer. In the bar the landlord was asleep behind the Lewes Gazette and South Coast Journal. In the parlor the landlady was asleep behind a screen of geraniums and campanulas. The ornamental clock on the mantelpiece said, most untruly, ten minutes to eight. Really it was four o’clock, the sleepiest hour in the day. The flies buzzed in the parlor window; in the bar the wasps buzzed in the bottle that had seemed so sweet a bourn to each as it drifted in from the out-of-door heat to the cool darkness of the sanded bar.

  On the broad, white door-step the old cat slept, his person nicely adjusted to the sun and shade, his flanks in the sunshine and his head in the shadow of the porch. The white blind of the window swelled out, now and then, like a sail, because in this sort of weather one leaves all doors and windows open. In the yard some one had drawn a bucket of water — the brown oak and the brown iron of the bucket were still wet, and still wet the trail it had made where it was carried to the old bath that the chickens drank from. But the trail was drying quickly, and the hens, having had their drink, had gone to sleep in the hollows they had scooped for themselves in the dust of their inclosure. Some one had been chopping wood, for a few chips lay round the block, in which the bill was stuck by its sharp edge. The man who attended to the wood and water was asleep, standing against the ladder that led from the stable to the hay-loft — a convenient position, and, if you were wanted in a hurry, not compromising, as lying down would be.

  To right and left the road stretched, very white and shining, between dusty hedgerows and scattered cottages whose drawn blinds looked like the eyelids of sleepers. The whole village was asleep, it seemed — only a boy and a dog were awake. The boy had not gone to school because he had torn his every-day trousers on a nail in the stable. To wear his Sunday trousers was, of course, out of the question. And to mend the every-day trousers would take time. So Tommy was put to bed, nominally as a punishment for not looking where he was going — a most unfair implication, for the nail had attacked him in the rear. Children do not go to sleep when they are put to bed as a punishment. They cry, if their spirit has been broken by unkindness; if not, they lie and meditate mischief. Tommy waited till the afternoon silence settled on the house, and then very carefully and slowly crept down the stairs in his nightshirt, dodged Gladys and the mop, and reached the larder. Here he secured a flead-cake, a raisin-cake, and an apple, dodged Gladys again, and reached the back door, where he stood looking out at the yard. It would be silly to go back to bed. Mother would not be awake for a good half-hour yet. There would be time to get to the stable, climb into the loft, and eat his booty there. It would be safer, in one way, and in another more adventurous.

  He stooped till his head was below the kitchen window and crept by, skirting the walls of the yard till he reached the stable door, and next moment was safe in the half-darkness where the sunlight through the cracks of the door made dusty shafts of radiance. The familiar smell of hay and horses charmed him, as it always did. Ah, there was Robert, asleep as usual. Well, even if Robert woke, he could be trusted not to tell. Tommy climbed into the manger of one of the empty stalls, and just as he got his knee on it some one behind pushed him with sudden and incredible violence. He fell heavily, dropped his plunder, and found himself involved in the enthusiastic embraces of a large, strange, white dog, which in one breathless instant licked his face all over, trampled on his stomach, made two mouthfuls of the flead-cake and the raisin-cake, rolled the apple in the muck of the stable, snorted in a sort of brutal ecstasy, and bolted heavily out into the sunshine.

  It was too much. The sudden and brutal attack overcame all considerations of prudence. Tommy forgot where he was, and why; the dangers of his situation were nothing beside the outrage of this unprovoked assault and theft. Robert was awakening slowly. If he had been awake before he might have repulsed the enemy. Tommy opened his mouth to howl, but the howl changed to a scream, for there was the dog back again, snuffing loudly in the straw and fawning at Tommy as on an old and valued friend.

  “Charles!” a stern voice called from the yard, “come here, sir.”

  The dog wagged a muscular tail and grinned at Tommy, as though inviting him to share the joke. The stable door was darkened by a form. Even in the difficulties of repulsing the dog’s attention without irritating it, the child found time to be glad that the darkening form was that of a stranger.

  “Call him off, if he’s your dog,” Tommy urged, thickly, backing against the manger.

  “Might as well call him off, sir,” Robert — now almost awake — conceded.

  The stranger stepped forward, a snap clicked, and Charles, still widely smiling, was straining at the end of a leathern thong.

  “I hope he didn’t frighten you,” said the stranger.

  “He bunted at me with his great head,” said Tommy, with half a sob, “and then he eat up what I’d got, and hooked it off again afore you could say knife.”

  “What had you got?”

  “Nothing,” said Tommy, remembering caution, “at least—”

  “The jingling of the guinea heals,” said the stranger, incomprehensibly. “Would sixpence be any comfort to you?”

  Tommy’s eyes answered, and the stranger held it out.

  “Thank you, sir,” said Tommy, and added, in close imitation of his father’s manner to thirsty travelers, “Going far to-day, sir?”

  “I was thinking,” said the stranger, “of putting up here.”

  “Then,” said Tommy, with great presence of mind, “please don’t say anything to them about the dog eating — what he did eat — nor me being here in my shirt, nor about Robert being asleep. If you’ll go round to the front, sir, you’ll find the bar, and that’ll give me a chance to slip back to bed, sir, if you’d be so kind.”

  “I see,” said the stranger, “you were sent to bed.”

  “In punishment like,” said Tommy, “so you see I don’t want to. . . .”

  “Exactly. An unobserved retreat. I will draw the enemy’s fire from the front premises. Come, Charles.”

  Charles obeyed, only pausing to entangle the lead in the handle of a shovel and to bring this down upon the feet of Robert, to upset a sieve of chaff and run between his master’s legs with a sudden violence which, but for the support of the door-post, would have thrown him to the ground.

  “Nice-spoken young man,” said Robert. “Now, young Tommy, you cut along back where you belong. I’ll be asking Gladys the time to keep her off of the back door while you slips in, you young limb.”

  He strolled across to the window as Tommy’s bare feet trod the sun-warmed bricks to the back door. As the child crept up the stairs he heard the stranger’s voice in the bar.

  “Sixpence,” said Tommy, in ecstasy, “and him going to put up here.” He cuddled down into his bed well satisfied with the afternoon’s adventure. Adventures are, indeed, to the adventurous.

  “If I’d ‘a’ bin a good boy and stayed in bed nothing wouldn’t have happened,” was how he put it to himself.

  Meanwhile the stranger, encumbered by the striving Charles, was “being shown the rooms” — the bare, much-scrubbed bedroom, the all-too-full and too-carpeted parlor.

  “They are exactly what I want,” he said, and so won the heart of his hostess.

  When Tommy, his trousers restored, came down to tea he was warned not to go clamping abou
t in his boots, because there was a gentleman in the parlor. Tommy fingered the sixpence in his pocket and said nothing; his mouth was, indeed, far too full for words.

  That evening in the parched orchard behind the house Tommy came edging shyly toward the stranger as he lounged under the trees smoking a fat pipe.

  “Hullo, young man!” was the greeting. “Come here and talk to me.”

  Tommy dumbly drew near.

  “Got your trousers back, I see,” said the stranger, genially.

  Tommy admitted it with a grunt. The stranger nodded and took his pipe out of his mouth.

  “Ever see a pig?” he asked.

  Tommy grunted again.

  “I see you have. You speak their language awfully well.” The stranger uttered a sound which Tommy recognized and smiled to hear. “That’s what the pigs say,” said the stranger. “Agreeable little boys who have recovered their trousers say ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ when their friends ask them questions. Don’t they?”

  “I dun’no’,” said Tommy.

  “Oh yes, you do. Because I’ve told you. Now what would you like to do?”

  “I dun’no’.”

  “I can’t tell you that you know, because I don’t know myself. But I’ll put it to you like this: If you can make up your mind to talk the language of agreeable little boys who have recovered their trousers, I am disposed to endure your company and even to assist you in any play you may have in hand. But I can’t associate with a person who grunts at me. If you want to grunt, go and grunt at some one who likes it. I don’t.”

  “I didn’t go for to,” Tommy urged.

  “Handsomely admitted. I accept your apology. You don’t know what you’d like to do, I say. Well, is there anything you’d like to have? I’m living the idle life, Tommy, and my hands are beginning to ache for want of something to do. I want to make something. Ever make anything?”