Complete Novels of E Nesbit

by Edith Nesbit

  “I made a rabbit-hutch, onst,” Tommy owned, “but the door warn’t straight on her hinges. And I tried a kite — but it stuck to me and come to bits afore ever it was dry.”

  “Look here,” said the stranger, sitting up, “what about a kite? I could make you a kite as big as a house or a fire-balloon. Would you like that?”

  Tommy began a grunt, pretended that it had been a cough, and turned that into, “Yes, please, sir.”

  “We must restrain Charles,” said the stranger, turning to the large white dog, who sat with feet firmly planted, smiling a wide, pink smile, “or this kite will certainly stick to him and come to pieces afore it’s dry. Where’s the shop?”

  “Down street,” said Tommy. “I could pop down street in a minute for the paper and things.”

  “Sure you’d rather have a kite than anything else?”

  Tommy hesitated, and then said of course he’d rather have a hairyplane, but he supposed the stranger couldn’t.

  To which the stranger startlingly replied, “Oh, couldn’t I, my boy! Father got a horse and trap?” he went on. And from that moment the most wonderful four days of Tommy’s life moved forward majestically without pause or let.

  To drive into Eastbourne with the gentleman — rather slow the old horse was, but it was the best trap — to hold the reins outside important and unusual shops, including the Eastbourne Motor-Car Company and the telegraph-office at the station; to be taken to dinner at a fine hotel with flowers in all the windows, and real waiters dressed exactly like the gentlemen who sang at the school concert, white ties and all — or just like the butler at Mr. Ferney’s who had the training-stables — and such things to eat as Tommy “never did.”

  The horse and trap were put up at Mr. Pettigrew’s Livery and Bait Stables, in itself an act of unheard-of daring and extravagance. And after dinner the stranger got a motor-car — a real private one — none of your red flags and mustn’t ride on the front seat, where, in fact, he and the stranger did, with great dash and daring, actually ride. And they went to Pevensy and Hurstmonceau and Hastings, and the stranger told Tommy stories about the places, so that history was never quite itself again to Tommy. Then back to Eastbourne, to call again at the unusual shops, as well as at one of the more usual character, where the stranger bought toffee and buns and cake and peppermint creams; to get a parcel from the station, and so home round the feet of the downs in the pleasant-colored evening, with the dust white on the hedges, and the furze in flower, and the skylarks singing “fit to bu’st theirselves,” as Tommy pointed out when the stranger called his attention to the little, dark, singing specks against the clear sky, the old white horse going at a spanking pace. No one would have believed he had it in him, compared to what he was in the morning; and drawing up very short and sharp in front of the porch — no driving into the yard and just calling for Robert — and father himself coming out to take the reins. Oh, that was a day!

  To the stranger, also, whose name, it will surprise you little to learn, was Edward Basingstoke, the home-coming was not without charm. The day before he had been welcomed as a guest; now he was welcomed as a friend, one who had taken Tommy for an outing and spent money on him like water. Any one could see that from the parcels the child had his arms full of.

  Robert in the stable, hearing the return, and heartened by the unmistakable attitude of the family, loosened Charles from the taut chain at whose end he had choked all day, and sent him flying like a large white bullet into the bar, where his master was standing. Charles knocked over a table and three glasses, trod on the edge of a spittoon and upset it, and the landlord said it didn’t matter! Could any reception have been more warmly welcoming?

  It charmed Edward so much that he said, “When Tommy’s face is washed, might he have tea with me to finish up the day?”

  And this, too, happened. And after tea, when Charles had been partially calmed by five whole buns, eaten in five eager mouthfuls, they undid the parcels, and Tommy reveled in the tools and metals, the wood, the canvas, the dozen other things he knew neither the names nor the uses of. And when it was time to say good night and they had said it, Tommy wanted to say something else. He stood by the parlor door, shuffling his boots and looking with blue, adoring eyes at the stranger.

  “I say,” he said.

  “Well, what do you say?”

  “I say,” was still all that Tommy said.

  “Yes, I hear you do. But what?”

  “I’m right-down glad you come here to stay, instead of going on to Wilmington, like what you might have,” was the most Tommy could do. Then he added, after a fierce, brief struggle between affection and shyness: “I do take it very kind, sir — and the peppermints, and all. Good night, sir.”

  It was the happiest day Edward had spent since he left Crewe.

  And next day they began to make the aeroplane. I do not know how toy aeroplanes are made. There may be a hundred ways of making them. If there are, Mr. Basingstoke knew at least one of these ways, and it was quite a good way, too. The village carpenter and the village blacksmith each was visited — I know that — and a good deal of the work was done at the carpenter’s bench. And at the end of the third day the toy was ready.

  “We’ll fly it in the morning,” said Mr. Basingstoke. “Are you glad it’s done? Sure you wouldn’t have liked a kite better?”

  “Not by long chalks,” was Tommy’s fervent answer.

  The little aeroplane sat on the little stand the carpenter had made for it, shiny with varnish, white with canvas, glittering in all its metal mysteries.

  “Jiminy!” said Tommy, awe-stricken at his own good fortune, “I didn’t know anybody could be so clever as what you are.”

  Edward Basingstoke, as he went to bed, wondered whether, after all, he could spend his money to any better purpose than going about the country making aeroplanes to please little boys.

  III. EDEN

  WHEN you have made an aeroplane, the next thing is to make it fly. And however agreeable an admiring audience may be while one is fiddling with definite and concrete objects of wood, canvas, and metal, one is apt, for the flight itself — the great flight, the flight by which the aeroplane shall stand or fall — to desire solitude.

  That was why Edward drew the yellow blind up and the dimity curtain aside and turned his bed round, so that the sun at its first rising should strike through his dreams and awaken him. The sun did exactly what it was expected to do, and Edward awoke saying “Bother” before he remembered that “Bother” was not at all what he meant. Then he got up and splashed gently, so as not to break the audible sleep of the people in the next room, stole down the creaking, twisted stairs in his tennis-shoes, soft-footed as a cat, drew the bolts of the back door, and slipped out, closing the door noiselessly behind him. He was careful to draw the bolt into its place again by means of a bit of fishing-line. You can do this quite easily with an old door that does not fit very closely — if you are careful to mark with chalk on the outside of the door, as Edward did, the exact place where the bolt is. Having thus secured the door against passing tramps or burglars, he went out across the highroad, soft with thick, white dust, where the dew lay on hedge and grassy border, and the sun made diamonds of the dew. Charles, choking himself in the stable, grew faint with distance.

  Beyond the village was a meadow suited to his needs. It was bordered on one side by a high red-brick wall, above whose moss-grown coping the rounded shapes of trees leaned. A wood edged it on two other sides, and in the front was a road.

  Here he made his preparations, wound up his machine, and, after one or two false starts, got it going. He meant to fly it like a kite, and to this end he had tied one end of a ball of fine twine to the middle of its body. Now he raised it above his head and launched it. The little creature rose like a bird; the ball of string leaped and jumped between his feet, as he paid out the line; the whirring wings hung poised a second, at the level of the tree-tops, and then, caught by the wind, sailed straight toward the red wall,
burrowed into the trees, and stopped. He ran toward the wall, winding up the string, and stood below, looking up. He could not see the winged loose thing. He tweaked the string and his tweak was met with uncompromising resistance. The aeroplane had stuck in a chestnut-tree, and hung there, buzzing.

  Edward measured the wall with his eye. It was an old wall, of soft red brick, from which the mortar had fallen away. In its crannies moss grew, and ragged-robin and ground-ivy hung their delicate veil in the angles of its buttresses — little ferns and wall-flowers run to seed marked its courses, the yellow snapdragon which English children call toad-flax flaunted its pure sulphur-colored plumes from the ledge below the coping. An architect would have said that the wall wanted pointing; a builder would have pointed it — an artist would have painted it. To an engineer in grief for a lost toy the wall presented itself as an obstacle to be climbed. He climbed it.

  He thrust the string into his jacket pocket, and presently set hand and foot to the hold that the worn wall afforded. In half a minute he was astride the coping; next moment he had swung by his hands and let himself go on the wall’s other side. It was a longer drop than he expected; it jarred him a little, and his hat tumbled off. As he picked this up he noticed that the wall on the inside had been newly pointed. The trees were a good thirty feet from the wall. There would be no getting back by the way he had come. He must find a gate. Meantime the little aeroplane’s buzzing had grown faint and ceased. But the twine led him to the tree, as the silken clue led Queen Eleanor to the tower of Fair Rosamond. The next thing was to climb the tree and bring down the truant toy.

  The park spread smooth and green before him — the green smoothness that comes only to English grass growing where grass has been these many years. Quiet trees dotted the smooth greenness — thickening about the house, whose many chimneys, red and twisted, rose smokeless above the clustered green. Nothing moved in all the park, where the sun drank the dew; birds stirred and twittered in the branches — that was all. The little aeroplane had stopped its buzzing. Edward was moved to thank Fate that he had not brought Charles. Also he was glad that this trespass of his had happened so early. He would get down the aeroplane and quietly go out by the lodge gate. Even if locked, it would be climbable.

  The chestnut-tree, however, had to be climbed first. It was easy enough, though the leaves baffled him a little, so that it was some time before he saw the desired gleam of metal and canvas among the dappled foliage. Also, it was not quite easy to get the thing down without injuring it, and one had to go slowly.

  He lowered it, at last, by its string to the ground from the lowest branch, then moved along a little, hung by his hands, and dropped.

  He picked up the toy and turned to go. “Oh!” he said, without meaning to. And, “I beg your pardon,” without quite knowing what for.

  Because, as he turned he came face to face with a vision, the last one would have expected to see in an English park at early day. A girl in a Burmese coat, red as poppies, with gold-embroidered hem a foot deep. Her dress was white. Her eyes were dark, her face palely bright, and behind her dark head a golden-green Japanese umbrella made a great ridged halo.

  “I beg your pardon,” said Edward again, and understood that it was because he was, after all, trespassing.

  “I should think you did,” said the vision, crossly. “What on earth do you mean by it? How did you get in?”

  Edward, standing a little awkwardly with the aeroplane in his hands, looked toward the wall.

  “I came over after this,” he said. “I’m very sorry. I was flying the thing and it stuck in the tree. If you’ll tell me the way to the lodge, I’ll — I hope I didn’t scare you.”

  “I couldn’t think what it was,” she answered, a little less crossly. “I saw the tree tossing about as if — as if it had gone mad.”

  “And you thought of dryads and hastened to the spot. And it was only an idiot and his aeroplane. I say — I am sorry—”

  “You can’t help not being a dryad,” she said, and now she smiled, and her smile transformed her face as sunlight does a landscape. “What I really thought you were was a tramp. Only tramps never climb trees. I couldn’t think how you got in here, though. Tramps never climb walls. They get in sometimes through the oak fence beyond the plantations.”

  “It was very intrepid of you to face a tramp,” he said.

  “Oh, I love tramps,” she said; “they’re always quite nice to you if you don’t bully them or patronize them. There were two jolly ones last week, and I talked to them, and they made tea out in the road, you know, and gave me a cup over the fence. It was nasty.” She shuddered a little. “But I liked it awfully, all the same,” she added. “I wish I were a tramp.”

  “It’s not a bad life,” said he.

  “It’s the life,” she said, enthusiastically. “No ties, no responsibilities — no nasty furniture and hateful ornaments — you just go where you like and do what you like; and when you don’t like where you are, you go somewhere else; and when you don’t like what you’re doing, you needn’t go on doing it.”

  “Those are very irresponsible sentiments — for a lady.”

  “I know. That’s why I think it’s so dull being a woman. Men can do whatever they want to.”

  “Only if they haven’t their living to earn,” said Edward, not quite so much to himself as he would have liked.

  There was a little pause, and then, still less himself, he blundered into, “I say, it is jolly of you to talk to me like this.”

  She froze at once. “I forgot,” she said, “that we had not been introduced. Thank you for reminding me.”

  Edward’s better self was now wholly lost, and what was left of him could find nothing better to answer than, “Oh, I say!”

  “What I ought to have said,” she went on, her face a mask of cold politeness, “is that you can’t possibly get out by the lodge. There are fierce dogs. And the lodge-keepers are worse than the dogs. If you will follow me — at a distance, for fear I should begin to talk to you again — I’ll show you where the gardener’s ladder is, and you can put it up against the wall and get out that way.”

  “Couldn’t I get out where the tramps get in?” he asked, humbly. “I don’t like to trouble you.”

  “Not from here. We should have to pass close by the house.”

  The “we” gave him courage. “I say — do forgive me,” he said.

  “There’s nothing to forgive,” said she.

  “Oh, but do,” he said, “if you’d only see it! It was just because it was so wonderful and splendid to have met you like this . . . and to have you talk to me as you do to the other tramps.”

  “You’re not a tramp,” she said, “and I ought not to have forgotten it.”

  “But I am,” said he, “it’s just what I really and truly am.”

  “Come and get the ladder,” said she, and moved toward the wall.

  “Not unless you forgive me. I won’t,” he added, plucking up a little spirit, “be indebted for ladders to people who won’t forgive a man because he speaks the truth clumsily.”

  “Come,” she said, looking back over her shoulder.

  “No,” he said, obstinately, not moving. “Not unless you forgive me.”

  “It can’t possibly matter to you whether I forgive you or not,” she turned to say it. And as she spoke there came to Edward quite suddenly and quite unmistakably the knowledge that it did matter. Sometimes glimpses do thus suddenly and strangely come to us — and that by some magic inner light that is not reason we know things that by the light of reason we could never know.

  “Look here,” he said. “I’ll go after that ladder in a minute. But first I’ve got something to say to you. Don’t be angry, because I’ve got to say it. Do you know that just now — just before I said that stupid thing that offended you — you were talking to me as though you’d known me all your life?”

  “You needn’t rub it in,” she said.

  “Do you know why that is? It’s because y
ou are going to know me all your life. I’m perfectly certain of it. Somehow or other, it’s true. We’re going to be friends. I sha’n’t need to say again how jolly it is of you to talk to me. We shall take all that as a matter of course. People aren’t pitchforked into meetings like this for nothing. I’m glad I said that. I’m glad you were angry with me for saying it. If you hadn’t I might just have gone away and not known till I got outside — and then it would have been a deuce and all of a business to get hold of you again. But now I know. And you know, too. When shall I see you again? Never mind about forgiving me. Just tell me when I shall see you again. And then I’ll go.”

  “You must be mad,” was all she could find to say. She had furled her sunshade and was smoothing its bamboo ribs with pink fingers.

  “You’ll be able to find out whether I’m mad, you know, when you see me again. As a matter of fact — which seems maddest, when you meet some one you want to talk to, to go away without talking or to insist on talk and more talk? And you can’t say you didn’t want to talk to me, because you know you did. Look here, meet me to-morrow morning again — will you?”

  “Certainly not.”

  “You’ll be sorry if you don’t. We’re like two travelers who have collected all sorts of wonderful things in foreign countries. We long to show each other our collections — all the things we’ve thought and dreamed. If we’d been what you call introduced, perhaps we shouldn’t have found this out. But as it is, we know it.”

  “Speak for yourself,” she said.

  “Thank you,” he said, seriously. “I will. Will you sit down for ten minutes? This tree-root was made for you to sit down on for ten minutes, and I will speak for myself.”

  “I can’t,” she said, and her voice — there was hurry in it, and indecision, but the ice had gone. “You must come at once for that ladder. It’s getting more dangerous every moment. If any one saw you here there’d be an awful row.”