Complete Novels of E Nesbit

by Edith Nesbit

  And now the houses were thick and the shops began to score the streets with lines of color. He stopped at one of those big shops where they sell everything, and she awoke and said, “Are we there?”

  “I thought,” said he, “that you said something about a hat.”

  “Here?” she said, looking at the shop with strong distaste.

  “Better here than really in London, I thought. And you’ll want other things. And do you mind buying a box or a portmanteau or something? Because hotels like you to have luggage.”

  “I’ve been thinking—” she said, but he interrupted her.

  “Forgive me,” he said, “but even you cannot think your best thoughts when you’re asleep.”

  Then she laughed. “Well, you must give me the money,” she said, holding out a bare, unashamed hand, “because I haven’t any.”

  He composed himself to wait, and he waited a long time, a very, very long time. He cheered the waiting by the thought that she could not, after all, have found the shop so unsuitable as it had, at the first glance, seemed. He watched the doorway, and his eye became weary of the useless snippets of lace and silk at something eleven-three with which the windows at each side of the door were plastered. He noticed the people who went in, and the many more who waited outside and longed for these absurd decorations — longed with that passion which, almost alone of the passions, a girl may display to the utmost immoderation without fear of censure or of shame. He observed the longing in the eyes of little, half-developed, half-grown girls for this or that bit of worthless frippery; he would have liked to call to them and say, “My dear children, do go in and buy yourself each a fairing, and let me pay.” But he knew that so straightforward and simple a kindness would draw on him and on the children shame and censure almost immeasurable. So he just sat and was sorry for them, till he saw two of them titter together and look at him.

  Then he got out of the car and went into the shop — they sold toys there as well as everything else — to buy something himself. He could not find exactly what he wanted — in shops crowded with glittering uselessnesses it is rarely that you can find the particular uselessness on which you have set your heart — but Tommy of the Five Bells had no fault to find with the big, brown-papered parcel which reached him by the next day’s afternoon post. He could not imagine any soldiers more perfectly satisfying than these, no bricks more solid and square, no drafts more neatly turned, no dominoes more smoothly finished. To Mr. Basingstoke’s old nurse the world seemed to hold nothing fairer than the lace collar and the violet-silk necktie. “Do me for Sundays for years,” she said, putting them back in their tissue-paper and turning her attention to the box of sweets and the stockings for the children. The girl who sold Mr. Basingstoke the lace collar sniggered apart with a kindred sniggerer as she sold it to him, and delayed to make out his bill, but the other girl, almost a child, with a black bow tying her hair, sold him the stockings and was sympathetic and helpful.

  “How many stockings ought a child to have, so as to have plenty?” he asked her, confidentially. At the lace-counter he had made his own choice, in stern silence.

  “Three pairs,” said the girl; “that’s one in wear, one in the wash, and one in case of accidents.” She glanced through the glass door at the motor, and decided that he could afford it. “But, of course, four would be better.”

  “I should think six would be best,” said he, “that’s one for each day in the week, and on Saturday they can stay in bed while their mother does the washing.”

  “You don’t wash on Saturdays,” said the girl, her little, plain face lighting up with a smile. She saw the eye of the shop-walker on her and added, nervously, “Shall we say six, then, sir; and what size? I mean what aged child? About what price?”

  “Three to eleven,” said he.

  “They’re one and eleven-three,” said she.

  “I mean the children, not the stockings — there are five of them — what’s five sixes?”

  “Thirty,” the girl told him, with a glance at the shop-walker that was almost defiant in its triumph.

  “That’s it, then,” said he, “and sort out the sizes properly, please, will you? Three six, two sevens, ten and eleven. And put in some garters — children’s stockings are always coming down, you know—”

  The girl had not before sold garters to insane but agreeable gentlemen. She hesitated and said in a low voice, “I don’t think garters, sir. Suspenders are more worn now—”

  “Well, suspenders then. The means doesn’t matter — it’s the keeping up that’s the important thing.” He laid a five-pound note on the counter, just as the shop-walker came up to her with a slightly insolent, “Serving, Miss Moore?”

  “Sign, sir,” said Miss Moore, defending herself from his displeasure with the bill. “Anything more, sir?”

  “I want some sweets,” said Edward, and was directed to “the third shop on the left, through there.”

  It was not till two weeks later that a satined and beribboned box of sweets arrived by post for Miss Moore. “From Mary,” said the legend within, and the postmark was Warwick. Mr. Basingstoke counted on every one’s having at least one relation or friend bearing that commonest and most lovely of all names. And he was right. A distant cousin got the credit of the gift, which made the little apprentice happy for a day and interested for a week — exactly as Mr. Basingstoke had intended. His imagination pleased him with the picture of the sudden surprise of a gift, in that drab and subordinated life. By such simple means Mr. Basingstoke added enormously to his own agreeable sensations. And by such little exercises of memory as that which registered Miss Moore’s name and the address of the shop he made those pleasures possible for himself. The sweets he bought on that first day of his elopement went to his nurse. He might have added more gifts, for the pleasure of spending money was still as new as nice, but the voice of Charles without drew him from the shop to settle a difference of opinion between that tethered dog and the chauffeur.

  “Wanted to hang hisself over the side of the car,” the man explained, “and no loss to his mourning relations, if you ask me,” he added, sourly.

  Edward had hardly adjusted the situation before she came out — and he felt the sight of her was worth waiting for. She wore now a white coat with touches of black velvet, and the hat was white, too, with black and a pink rose or two.

  “It looks more like Bond Street than Peckham,” he said as she got in. “It surpasses my wildest dreams.”

  “I had to make them trim it,” she said, “that’s why I was such ages. All the ones they had were like Madge Wildfire — insane, wild, unrelated feathers and bows born in Bedlam.”

  Her eyes, under the brim of the new hat, thrilled him, and when Charles, leaping on her lap, knocked the hat crooked, scattered the mound of parcels, and made rosetted dust-marks on the new cloak, her reception of these clumsy advances would have endeared her to any one to whom she was not already dear.

  “Well,” she said, tucking Charles in between them, setting the hat straight, and dusting the coat, all in one competent movement, “have you had time yet to think what you’re going to do with me?”

  “I have had time,” he said, rearranging the mound.

  “I’m so sorry I was so long, but. . . .”

  “It was worth it,” he said, looking at the hat. “Well, what I propose is that you should go, not to Claridge’s, which is just the place where your relations will look for you, but to one of those large, comfortable hotels where strictly middle-class people stay when they come up to London on matters connected with their shops or their farms. I will give you as long as you like to unpack your new portmanteau and your parcels. Then I’ll call for you and take you out to dinner.”

  “But I thought we were going on tramp,” she objected.

  “Dinner first, tramping afterward,” he said, “a long while afterward. I don’t propose to let you tramp in those worldly shoes.” They were new and brown and soft to look at — as soft as other people
’s gloves, he thought.

  “Don’t dress for dinner,” he said as they drew up in front of the Midlothian Hotel. “And, I say, I expect it would be safer to dine here; it’s absolutely the last place where any of your people would look for you.”

  The dress in which she rejoined him later was a walking-dress of dark blue melting to a half transparency at neck and sleeves.

  “I bought it at that shop,” she said. “It isn’t bad, is it? They said it was a Paris model — and, anyhow, it fits.”

  He wanted to tell her that she looked adorable in it, and that she would look adorable not only in a Paris model, but in a Whitechapel one. But he didn’t tell her this. Nor did he tell her much else. The dinner owed to her any brightness that it showed when shelved as a memory. She exerted herself to talk. And it was the talk of a lady to her dinner partner — light, gay, and sparkling, anything but intimate — hardly friendly, even; polite, pleasant, indifferent. He did not like it; he did not like, either, his own inability to carry on the duet in the key she had set, and at the same time he knew that he could not change the key. The surge of the world was round them again, even though it was only the world of the provincial haberdasher and the haberdasher’s provincial wife. The smooth, swift passage of laden waiters across the thick carpets of the dining-room; the little tables gay with pink sweet-peas and rosy-hued lamps; the women in smart blouses, most of them sparkling beadily; the rare evening toilettes, worn in every case with an air of conscious importance, as of one to whom wearing evening dress was a rare and serious exception to the rule of life; the buzz of conversation curiously softer and lower in pitch than the talk at the Ritz and the Carlton — all made an atmosphere of opposition, an atmosphere in which all that appeared socially impossible — which, under the stars last night, had seemed natural, inevitable — the only thing to do. This world to which he had brought her had, at least, this in common with the world which dines at the Carlton and the Ritz, that it bristled with the negation of what last night had seemed the simplest solution in the world. But it had only seemed simple, as he now saw, because the solution had been arrived at out of the world. Here, beyond any doubt, was the antagonism to all that he and she had planned. This was the world where the worst scandal is the unusual — where it would be less socially blighting to steal another man’s wife than to set off on a tramp with a princess to whom you were tied neither by marriage nor by kinship.

  It was a lengthy silence in which he thought these things. She, in the silence, had been making little patterns with bread-crumbs till the waiter swept all away, made their table tidy, and brought the dessert. She looked up from the table-cloth just in time to see Edward smile grimly.

  “What is it?” she asked, a little timidly.

  “I was only thinking,” he said, “what a two-penny halfpenny business we’ve made of life, with our electric light and our motors and our ugly houses and our civilization generally. A civilization replete with every modern inconvenience! In the good old days nobody would have minded a knight and a princess traveling through the world together, or even around the world, for that matter. Whereas now. . . .”

  She looked at him, gauging this thought. And he knew that he had said enough to make a stupid woman say, “I thought you would want to back out of it.” What would she say? For a moment she said nothing. Then, sure of herself as of him, she smiled and said:

  “We’re going to teach Nobody to mind . . . its own business.”

  And then he said what he had come near to being afraid she would say.

  “You don’t want to back out of it, then?” he said, and she shook her head.

  “No,” she answered, slowly, and then, after a pause, again, “No.”

  “You are willing to go through the wood with your faithful knight, Princess? He will be a faithful knight.”

  “Yes,” she said, “I know.”

  And then suddenly he perceived what before had not been plain to him — that the elopement that had seemed to offer so royal a road to all that he really desired was not a road, but a barrier. That he was now in a position far less advantageous than that of a man who meets a girl all hedged around with the machinery of chaperonage, since, whereas the courtship may, where there is chaperonage, evade and escape it, where there is none the lover must himself supply its need — must, in fine, be lover and chaperon in one. Far from placing himself in a position where love-making would be easy, he had set himself where it was well-nigh impossible. He who courts a lady in her own home, surrounded by all the fences set up by custom and convention, can, at least, be sure that if his courtship be unwelcome it will be rejected. The lady need not listen unless she will. But when the princess rides through the wood with the knight whom she has chosen to be her champion she must needs listen if he chooses to speak. She can, of course, leave him and his championing, but what sort of championship is it which drives the princess back to the very dragon from which it rescued her? Edward saw, with dismal exactness, the intolerable impossibilities of the situation. They would go on — supposing her friends didn’t interfere — as friends and comrades, brother and sister, she more and more friendly, he more and more tongue-tied, till at last every spark of the fire of the great adventure was trampled out by the flat foot of habit.

  She might — and probably would, since men and women invariably misunderstand one another — believe his delicate reticences to be merely the indications of a waning interest, and construe knightly chivalry into mere indifference. If he made love to her — who could not get away from the love-making without destroying that which made it possible — he would be a presuming cad. If he didn’t, what could she think but that he regretted his bargain? As he sat there opposite his princess, alone with her among the thickly thinning crowd, he wondered whether out of this any happiness could come to them.

  When he had proposed the elopement he had meant marriage; the incurable temperamental generosity which had prompted him to offer her the help of the escape, on her own terms, now seemed to him the grossest folly. Yet how could he have held the pistol to her head, saying, “No marriage, no elopement.”

  Her voice broke his reverie. “I am very tired,” she said. “I think I’ll say good night. Do you mind?”

  He almost fancied that her lip trembled a little, like a child’s who is unhappy.

  “Of course you’re tired,” he said, “and, I say, you don’t mind my not having talked for the last few minutes? I’ve been thinking of you — nothing else but you.”

  “Yes,” said she, “it all looks very different here, as you say. Perhaps it will look more different even than this to-morrow. Shall we start on our tramp to-morrow — or shall I just go back and let’s forget we ever tried to do something out of a book? I think you will tell me honestly to-morrow whether you think I had better go back.”

  “To-morrow,” he said, looking into her eyes, “I will tell you everything you wish to hear. We’ll spend to-morrow in telling each other things. Shall we? Good night, Princess. Sleep well, and dream of the open road.”

  “I shall probably,” said the princess, “dream of my aunts.”

  IX. THE MEDWAY

  “IF you had a map and I could put my finger on any place I chose, I should open my eyes the least bit in the world and put my finger on the Thames,” she said at the breakfast-table, where she had for the first time sat opposite to him and poured his coffee, looking as demurely domestic as any haberdasher’s wife of them all.

  “The Thames?” he said. “I know a river worth two of that. . . .”

  “A river that’s worth two of the Thames must be the river of Paradise.”

  “So it is,” he assured her, “and probably the Thames is infested by your relations. For a serious and secret conference such as we propose to ourselves there is no place like the Medway.”

  She had thought the Medway to be nothing but mud and barges, and said so.

  “Ah, that’s below Maidstone. Above — But you’ll see. Wear a shady hat and bring that conspirato
r-looking cloak you wore last night — the fine weather can’t possibly last forever. Twenty minutes for breakfast, half an hour for a complete river toilette, and we catch the ten-seventeen from Cannon Street, easily.”

  “I haven’t a complete river toilette. And you? I thought you left all your possessions at the Five Bells—”

  “I am not the homeless orphan you deem me,” he said, accepting kidneys and bacon from a sleepy waiter. “I have a home, though a humble one, and, what’s more, it’s just around the corner — Montague Street, to be exact. Next door to the British Museum. So central, is it not? Some inward monitor whispered to me, ‘She will want to go on the river,’ and I laid out the complete boating-man’s costume, down to white shoes with new laces.”