Complete Novels of E Nesbit

by Edith Nesbit

  “No — no,” she said. “Let’s get away. I can’t bear it. Mrs. Peacock will see to it for us — won’t you?”

  “That I will, lovey, and keep the change for you against you call again. You can trust me.”

  “We don’t want any change,” she said. “Spend it all on buns, or cake, or anything you like. It is good of you. Oh, good-by, and thank you — so much. I didn’t think it would be like this,” she said, and gave Mrs. Peacock both hands, while Edward explained to the crowd outside.

  A wail of disappointment went up, but stayed itself as Mrs. Peacock rushed to the door.

  “It’s all true,” she said, in that thick, rich, caky voice; “every good little boy and gell’s to have a bun. Now then,” she added, in a perfect blaze of tactlessness, “three cheers for the bride and bridegroom, and many happy returns.”

  The two had to stand side by side and hear those shrill, thin cheers, strengthened by the voices of fathers and mothers at the windows. He had to wave his hat to the crowd and to be waved at in return from every window in the street — even those too far away for their occupants to have any certain idea why they cheered and waved. She had to bow and kiss her hand to the children and to bow and smile to the window-dwellers.

  Next moment she was out of the shop and running like a deer along a side-street, he following. They took hands and ran; and by luck their street brought them to a road where trams were, and escape. They rode on the top of the tram, and she held his hand all the way to Charing Cross. I cannot explain this. Neither of them spoke a word. Further, it was almost without a word that they got themselves to Richmond. It was not till they had been for many minutes in the deep quiet of the bracken and green leafage that she spoke, with a little laugh that had more than laughter in it.

  “We might almost as well,” she said, “have been married in church.”

  XIII. WARWICK

  ONLY those who have gone through the ceremony of a mock marriage, from the gentlest motives, and have soothed the solicitude of a beloved and invalid aunt by the gift of the marriage certificate thus obtained, can have any idea of the minor difficulties which beset the path of the really unselfish. Had the ceremony been one in which either party was deceived as to its real nature the sequent embarrassments would have been far less. The first and greatest was the question of names. The persons mentioned in the certificate now bedewed by the joyful tears of the invalid aunt, and scorched by the fierce fires of a first-class family row, were committed, so far as the family and the world knew, to a wedding-journey. That is to say, Mr. and Mrs. Basingstoke, after posting the certificate, were to proceed on their honeymoon. But cold mock marriages claim no honeymoon. So far the only explanation of the relations of the now mockly married had been made to Mr. Schultz across the peaches in the sunned and shadowy arbor at Tunbridge Wells. To Mr. Schultz the two were brother and sister. To travel as Mr. and Mrs. Basingstoke presented difficulties almost insurmountable — to pursue their wanderings as Mr. and Miss Basingstoke involved bother about letters and the constant risk of explanations to any of the friends and relations of either across whose path fate might be spiteful enough to drive them. Because, of course, your friends and relations know how many brothers and sisters you have and what they look like, and those sort of people never forget. You could never persuade them that the young man with whom you were traveling was a brother whom they had overlooked or forgotten.

  A long silence in the train that meant to go to Warwick was spent by each in the same tangle of puzzle and conjecture. They had the carriage to themselves. Her eyes were on the green changing picture framed by the window; his eyes noted the firm, pretty line of her chin, the way her hair grew, the delicate charm of the pale roses under the curve of her hat-brim — the proud carriage of head and neck; he liked the way she held herself, the way her hands lay in her lap, the self-possession and self-respect that showed in every line of that gracious figure.

  The four walls of the carriage seemed to shut them in with a new and deeper intimacy than yesterday’s. He would have liked to hold her hand as he had held it on the way to Richmond — to have her shoulder lightly touching his and to sit by her and watch the changing of that green picture from which she never turned her eyes. And all the time the two alternatives seesawed at the back of his mind: “Mr. and Mrs. or Mr. and Miss?”

  Her eyes suddenly left the picture and met his. In that one glance she knew what sort of thoughts had been his, and knew also quite surely and unmistakably, as women do know such things, that the relations between them had been changed by that mock marriage — that now it would not be he who would make the advances. That he was hers for the asking, she knew, but she also knew that there would have to be asking, and that asking hers. She knew then, as well as she knew it later, that that act had set a barrier between them and that his would never be the hand to break it down; a barrier strong as iron, behind which she could, if she would, remain alone forever — and yet a barrier which, if she chose that it should be so, her choice could break at a touch, as bubbles are broken. She felt as perhaps a queen in old romance might have felt traveling through the world served only by a faithful knight. That they had held each other’s hand on their wedding-day had been an accident. This would never happen again — unless she made it happen.

  “We must have our letters sent to the post-offices where we go,” she said, suddenly, turning to the problem at the back of her mind. “Then the aunts can call me ‘Mrs.’ when they write to me. I suppose they’ll want to call me that?”

  “Mrs. Basingstoke,” he said, slowly. “Yes, it seems likely that they will want to.”

  “Then,” she went on, “we needn’t pretend to the hotel people that we’re married. They’d be sure to find out we weren’t, or something, and we should always be trembling on the perilous edge of detection. I couldn’t bear to be always wondering whether the landlord had found us out.”

  “It would be intolerable,” he agreed, deeply conscious of the admirable way in which she grasped this delicate nettle. “Whereas. . . .”

  “Whereas if we’re Mr. and Miss Basingstoke at our hotels, and Mr. and Mrs. at the post-office, it’s all as simple as the Hebrew alphabet.”

  “The Hebrew. . . ?”

  “Well, it’s not quite as simple as A B C, but very nearly. So that’s settled.”

  “What,” he asked, hastily, anxious to show his sense of a difficulty avoided, a subject dismissed—”what do you think about when you look out of the windows in trains? Or don’t you think at all — just let the country flow through your soul as though it were music?”

  “One does that when one’s in it,” she answered, “in woods and meadows and in those deep lanes where you see nothing but the hedges and the cart-tracks — and on the downs — yes. But when you look out at the country it’s different, isn’t it? One looks at the churches and thinks about all the people who were christened and married and buried there, and then you look at the houses they lived in — the old farm-houses more than anything. Do you know, all my life I’ve wished I’d been born a farmer’s daughter. All the little things of life in those thatched homesteads are beautiful to me. The smell of the wood smoke, and the way all your life is next door to out-of-doors — always having to go out and feed the calves or the pigs or the fowls, and always little young things, the goslings and the ducklings and the chicks — you know how soft and pretty they are. And all these lovely little live things dependent on you. And the men as well — they come home tired from their work and you have their meals all ready — the bread you’ve baked yourself, and the pasties you’ve made — perhaps, even, you brew the beer and salt the pork — and they come in, your husband and your father and your brothers, and they think what a good housekeeper you are, and love you for it. Or if you’re a man yourself, all your work’s out of doors with the nice, clean earth and making things grow, and seeing the glorious seasons go round and round like a splendid kaleidoscope; and in the winter coming home through the dusk and seeing t
he dancing light of your own hearth-fire showing through the windows, till you go into the warm, cozy place, and then the red curtains are drawn and the door is shut, and you’re safe inside — at home.”

  He felt in every word a new intimacy, a new confidence. For the first time she was speaking to him from the heart without afterthought and without reservations. And he knew why. He knew that the queen, confident and confiding, spoke to the faithful knight. And the matter of her speech no less than its manner enchanted him so that he could think of nothing better to say than:

  “Go on — tell me some more.”

  “There isn’t any more, only I think that must have been the life I lived in my last incarnation, because a little house in the country — any little house, even an old turnpike cottage — always seems to call out to me, ‘Here I am! Come home! What a long time you’ve been away!’”

  “And yet,” he said, and felt, as he said it, how stupid he was being—”and yet you love traveling and adventure — seeing the world and the wonders of the world.”

  “Ah!” she said, “that’s my new incarnation. But what the old one loved goes deeper than that. I love adventure and new bits of the world as I love strawberries and ice-cream, and waltzing and Chopin, but the little house in the green country is like the daily bread of the heart.”

  “I understand you,” he said, slowly. “I understand you in the only possible way. I mean that’s the way I feel about it, too. If you were really my sister, what a united family the last of the Basingstokes would be.”

  “Do you really feel the same about it — you, too?” she asked. “Oh, what a pity I wasn’t born Basingstoke, and we would have lived on our own farm and been happy all our lives.”

  He would not say what he might have said, and her heart praised him for not saying it. And so at last they came to Warwick, and Charles had bounded from the dog-box all pink tongue and white teeth and strenuous white-covered muscles, and knocked down a little boy in a blue jersey, who had to be consoled by chocolate which came out of the machine like the god in the Latin tag. And then all the luggage was retrieved — there was getting to be a most respectable amount of it, as she pointed out — and it and they and Charles got into a fly (for there are still places where an open carriage bears that ironic name) and drove through the afternoon sunshine to the Warwick Arms. But when they were asked to write their names in the visitors’ book, each naturally signed a Christian name, and the management, putting two and two together, deduced Mr. and Mrs. Basingstoke, and entered this result in more intimate books, living in retirement in the glass case which preserves the young lady who knows all about which rooms you can have. The chambermaid and the boots agreed that Mr. and Mrs. Basingstoke were a handsome couple. Also, when a new-comer, signing his name, asked a question about the signatures just above his, “Mr. and Mrs. Basingstoke,” was the answer he got.

  Now all this time, for all her frankness, she had been concealing something from him.

  You must know that the wedding-dinner, if a mock marriage can be said to involve a wedding-dinner, had been at the Star and Garter, and after the wooded slopes and the shining spaces of the river her London hotel had seemed but a dull and dusty resting-place. And it was she who had met him when he called to take her out to breakfast with a petition for more river. So they had taken more river, in the shape of a Sunday at Coohmah, where the beautiful woods lean down to the water, and the many boats keep to the stream and the few creep into backwaters whither the swans follow you, and eat all the lunch if you will only give them half a chance. It was a delightful day, full of incident and charm. The cool, gleaming river, the self-possessed gray poplars, the generous, green-spreading beeches, the lovelorn willows trailing their tresses in the stream, the reeds and the rushes, the quiet, emphasized by the knowledge that but for the supremest luck they might have been two in a very large and noisy party, such as that on the steam-launch which thrust its nose into their backwater and had to back out with fussings and snortings, like a terrier out of a rabbit-hole. The dappled shadows on the spread carpet of lily-leaves, the green gleams in the deep darkness of the woods, the slow, dripping veil of dusk through which they rowed slowly back to the inn — even being late for the train and having to run for it — all, as he said, when they had caught the train and were crammed into a first-class carriage with three boating-men, a painted lady, an aged beau, and a gentleman almost of color, from Brazil — all had been very good. But he did not know all. There had been a moment, while he had gone in to the bar of the inn to settle for the boat — a moment in which she waited in the little grassy garden that shelves down to the river’s edge — and in that moment a boat slid up to the landing-stage. The first man to get out of it was nobody, and didn’t matter. The second was Mr. Schultz. As it happened, her face was lighted by a yellow beam from one of the inn windows, and as he landed the beam from the other window fell across his face, so that they saw and recognized each other in a blaze of light that might have been arranged for no other purpose.

  He raised his cap and she saw that he meant to speak, but one of his companions thrust the painter into his hand at exactly the nick of time. He was held there, for the moment. She had the sense to walk slowly into the inn, and Mr. Schultz might well have thought that she was staying there. She meant him to think so. Anyhow, he did not cast the painter from him, as he might have done, and hurry after her. “Later on will do,” was what his attitude and his look expressed.

  The moment she was out of his sight she quickened her pace, found Mr. Edward Basingstoke in the bar putting his change in his pocket, and, the moment the two were outside the street door, said, just, “We must run for it.” This was, providentially, true. And they ran for it, just catching it, without a breath to spare.

  Why did she not tell him that she had seen Schultz, that stout squire of the South Coast road? For one thing, Mr. Schultz seemed long ago and irrelevant. For another, he was discordant, and his very name, spoken, would break the spell of a very charming quiet which had infolded her and Edward all day long. Then there was the crowded carriage with the Brazilian gentleman, all observant, black, beady eye, and long yellow ear. And then, anyhow, what was the good of raking up Mr. Schultz, whom Edward had never really liked. So she did not tell him. Nor, for much the same reason, did he tell her that one of that shouting party who climbed into the train after it had actually started, and whom he saw as he leaned out of the window to buy chocolate from an accidental boy, was very like that chap Schultz — as like, in fact, as two peas.

  And the next day she packed up everything, and he packed up a good deal, and they started for Warwick; arrived there, had luncheon, and became immediately a pair of ardent sight-seers.

  The guide-book in the coffee-room assured them that “no visitor to Warwick with any sense of propriety thinks of remaining long without paying his respects to that historic and majestic pile known as Warwick Castle,” and this, they agreed, settled the question.

  So they went and saw Warwick Castle, with its great gray towers and its high gray walls, its green turf, and old, old trees. They saw the banqueting-hall that was burned down, and Guy’s punch-bowl that holds Heaven knows how many gallons.

  “It makes you thirsty to look at it,” said Edward.

  Also they saw the Portland vase which lives in a glass house all by itself, and the bed where Queen Anne slept, and the cedar drawing-room and the red drawing-room and the golden drawing-room, and all the other rooms which are “shown to visitors,” and longed lawlessly to see the rooms that are not so shown.

  “There must be some comfortable rooms in the house,” she said. “Even lords and ladies and Miss O’Gradys couldn’t really live in these museums.” And, indeed, all the rooms they saw were much too full of things curious, precious, beautiful, and ugly; but mostly large and all costly.

  “It must be pretty awful to be as rich as all this,” said Edward, as they came out of the castle gate.

  “Would it be? The guide-books say Lady Warw
ick says she strives to fulfil, imperfectly, it may be, the duties of her stewardship and the privileges of her heritage. It would be interesting, don’t you think, to find out just exactly what those were?”

  “If I had a castle,” said he, “there shouldn’t be a knickknack in it, nor a scrap of furniture later than seventeen hundred.”

  “I sometimes wonder whether it’s fair,” she said, “the way we collect old things. Have you noticed that poor people’s houses haven’t a decent bit of furniture in them? When my mother was little the cottages used to have old bureaus and tables and chests that had come down from father to son and from mother to daughter.”

  “It’s true,” said he, “and the worst of it is that we’ve not only taken away their furniture, but we’ve taken away their taste for it. They prefer plush and machine-made walnut to the old oak and elm and beech and apple-wood. It would be no good to give them back their old furnishing unless we could give them back their love of it. And that we can’t do.”

  “But if we bought modern things?”

  “Even then they wouldn’t care for the old ones. And the only beautiful modern things we have are imitations of the old ones. We’ve lost the art of furniture-making, and the art of architecture, and we’re losing even the art of life. It’s getting to be machine-made, like our chair-legs and our stone facings. I sometimes wonder whether we are really on the down-grade — and whether the grade is so steep that we sha’n’t be able to stop — and go on till there’s no life possible except the life that’s represented by the plush and walnut at one end and motors and the Ritz at the other.”

  “Can’t we resist? all the people who still care for beautiful things?”

  “We can collect them; it’s not taking them from the poor now — it’s taking them from the dealers who have cleared out the farms and cottages and little houses. I suppose one might make a nest, and live in it, but that wouldn’t change things or stop the uglification of everything. You can’t make people live beautifully by act of Parliament. The impulse to make and own beautiful things has to come from within — and it seems as though it were dead — killed by machinery and laissez-faire and the gospel of individualism, and I’m sorry to talk like a Fabian tract, but there it is. Forgive me, and let’s go down to Guy’s Cliff and see the Saxon Mill and the perfect beauty of mixed architecture that wasn’t trying to imitate anything.”