Complete Novels of E Nesbit

by Edith Nesbit

  “Yes, but go on with the tract.”

  “There isn’t any more, except that what’s so difficult is to know how to live without hurting some one else. This is my wander year. I’m spending my money just now for fun and to have a good time. I feel I deserve a holiday and I’m taking one. But what’s one to do with one’s life? How can one use one’s money so as to do no harm?”

  “If you invest it in mines or factories or railways, doesn’t that employ people and make trade better?” she asked, diffidently. “I’m sure I’ve heard people say so.”

  “Yes,” he said, grimly, “so have I. And, of course, it’s true. You launch your money into this horrible welter of hard work and chancy wages, and it helps to keep some people in motors and fur coats and champagne and diamonds, and it helps, too, to keep others on the perilous edge of despair, to keep them alive in a world where they’re never sure of next week’s meals, never free from worry from the cradle to the grave, with no poetry in their lives but love, and no magic but drink.”

  “But what are we to do?” she asked, and they paused a moment on the bridge to look to the splendid mass of Warwick Castle along the river where the swans float and the weeping willows trail their hair in the water.

  “I wish I knew,” he said. “There must be some way to live without having any part in the muddle.”

  “We’ll find a way,” said she. And his heart leaped, for he knew that this was the most intimate thing she had ever said to him.

  XIV. STRATFORD-ON-AVON

  WHEN you have seen Warwick Castle and Guy’s Cliff and the Saxon Mill — which is so old that it must be soothing to the most tempestuous temperament — and you hasten back to your hotel and get your dog — if that dog be Charles — on purpose to expose him to its calm influences, you go to St. Mary’s Church, which is, the guide-book tells you, “one of the most remarkable specimens of ecclesiastical architecture extant,” and you see the Norman Crypt, and the clumsy sarcophagus of Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke, who wrote his own epitaph, and you read how he was “servant to Queen Elizabeth, Canceller to King James, and friend to Sir Philip Sidney.”

  Also you see the Beauchamp Chapel, and love it and linger in it, admiring the tombs of the earls of Warwick and other grown-ups, and feeling, even after all these years, a thrill of sadness at the sight of the little effigy of the child whose brocaded gown the marble so wonderfully produces and whose little years knock at your heart for pity.

  “Here resteth,” says the monument, “the body of the noble Impe Robert of Dudley, . . . a child of greate parentage, but of farre greater hope and towardness, taken from this transitory unto the everlasting life in his tender age, . . . on Sunday the 19 of July, in the yeare of our Lorde God 1584.”

  You see, also, the Warwick pew, and wish you could have worshiped there.

  Then you go to Leicester’s Hospital, half timbered and beautiful, with the row of whispering limes on its terraced front, where the “brethren” still wear the “gown of blew stuff with the badge of the bear and ragged staff on the left sleeve.” And the badges are still those provided by Lord Leicester in 1571.

  You are sorry that the old banqueting-hall should now be used for the coal-cellar and the laundry of the brethren, and still more sorry that the minstrels’ gallery should have been cut off to enlarge the drawing-room of the Master’s house. If you are of a rude and democratic nature you may possibly comment on this in audible voices beneath the Master’s windows, which, I am sorry to say, was what Mr. Basingstoke and his companion did.

  You will see the Sidney porcupine on the wall of the quadrangle, some gilded quills missing, and no wonder, after all these years. You will see — and perhaps neglect to reverence, as they did — the great chair once occupied by that insufferable monarch and prig, James the First. You will visit the Brethren’s Chapel, which seems to be scented by all the old clothes ever worn by any of the old brethren, and you will come out again into the street, and, as you cross the threshold, it will be like stepping across three hundred years, and you will say so. Then you will probably say, “What about Stratford for this afternoon?” At least, that is what Edward said. And as he said it he was aware of a figure in black which said,

  “Can you tell me the way to Droitwich?”

  It was a woman, spare and pale, in black that was green, but brushed to threadbareness.

  “Do you want to walk?” Edward asked.

  “I’ve got to, sir,” she said.

  “Do you mind,” he asked, “telling me why you want to go?”

  “I’ve got relations there, sir,” said the woman in black, raising to his the plaintive blue eyes of a child set in a face that fifty years and more had wrinkled like a February apple. “My husband’s relations, that is. They might do something to help me. I might be able to be of use to them, just to work out my keep. It isn’t much I require. But I couldn’t—”

  She stopped, and Edward Basingstoke knew that she couldn’t even bring herself to name the great terror of the poor — the living tomb which the English call the workhouse.

  “I’m afraid you’ve had a hard time,” said Mr. Basingstoke.

  “I had many happy days,” she said, simply. “I always think you pay for everything you have, sooner or later. And I’m paying now. I don’t grudge it, but I’d like to end respectable. And thank you for asking so kindly, sir, and now I’ll be getting on.” And he saw in her eyes the fear that he would offer her money to pay her way to Droitwich.

  Instead he said: “We’re motoring your way this afternoon. If you’ll let us give you a lift—”

  The woman looked from one to the other. “Well,” she said, “I do call that kind. But I wasn’t asking for any help. And I’d best be getting on.”

  Then the other woman came quite close to the woman in black. “Won’t you,” she said, “come and have dinner with us — and then we’ll drive you over? Do come. We’re so happy and we do hate to think that you aren’t. Perhaps we can think of some way to help you . . . find you some work or something,” she added, hastily, answering the protest in the blue eyes.

  “I don’t like to, miss,” she said, “thanking you all the same. It’s truly good of you — but—”

  Edward moved away a pace or two and lit a cigarette. He never knew what his lady said to the woman in black, but when he turned again a handkerchief was being restored to a rubbed black leather reticule and the woman in black was saying,

  “Well, ma’am, since you say that, of course I can’t say no, and thank you kindly.”

  The three had dinner together in the little private room over the porch at the Warwick Arms, and as they passed through the hall there could have been, for the little woman in black, no better armor against the sniffs of chambermaids and the cold eyes of the lady in the glass case than the feel of another woman’s hand on her arm. She was very silent and shy, but not awkward or clumsy, during the meal, and when it was finished Edward got up and said,

  “Well, Katherine, I’ll leave you two to talk things over.”

  It was the first time he had called her by her name. She flushed and sparkled, and was startled and amazed next moment to know that she had answered,

  “Yes, dear, do—”

  Edward, however, was not unduly elated. He knew how women will play the part set for them, to the least detail. She hoped he had not noticed the slip which, quite unconsciously, the opening of her heart toward this sad sister-woman had led her to make. He wished that she had not first called him that in a mere desire to act up to what this woman would expect.

  He left them, and then the pitiful little story all came out, with fit accompaniment of sighs, and presently tears, together with those sweet and tender acts and words which blend with the sighs and tears of the sorrowful into a melody as sad as beautiful. They had been married thirty-seven years next Michaelmas; they had had a little shop — a little needlework and fancy shop. She had done well enough with the customers, but he had always done the buying, and when he was taken. . .
.

  “Ah, my dear, don’t cry,” said the one who was young and happy, “don’t cry. You’ll make him so sad.”

  “Do you think he knows?” the widow asked.

  “Of course he knows. He knows everything’s going to be all right, only he hates to see you miserable. He knows it’s only a little time, really, before you and he will be together again, and happy for ever and ever.”

  “I wish I could believe that.”

  “You must, because it’s true. I expect he’s been praying for you, and that’s why you met us — because, you know, I’m certain my” — she hesitated, but the word came instead of “brother,” which was what she thought she meant to say—”my husband will think of something for you to do to earn your living; he’s so clever. And I suppose the business—”

  Yes. The business had gone to pieces. Fashions change so, and the widow had not known how to follow the fashions in needlework. There was only enough left to pay the creditors, but every one had been paid, and with the pound or two left over she had lived, trying to get needle work, or even, at last, charring or washing. But it had all been no good; nothing had been any good.

  “And now,” said Katherine, “everything’s going to be good. You’ll see. Edward will think of something. Don’t cry any more. You must not cry. I can’t bear it, dear. Don’t.”

  “I’m only crying for joy,” said the woman whose life was over. “Even if he doesn’t think of anything, I can’t ever despair again, and you being like you have to me.”

  But when Edward came back he had thought of something. His old nurse, it seemed, was in temporary charge of a house that wanted a housekeeper, and he was sure Mrs. Burbidge understood housekeeping.

  Mrs. Burbidge owned to an understanding of plain cooking and plain housekeeping. Also needlework, both the plain and the fine. “But not where butlers are kept,” she said, apprehensively.

  “This is a farm-house,” said Edward. “Not a butler within miles.”

  “My father was a farmer, in Somerset,” said Mrs. Burbidge, “but, oh, sir, you don’t know anything about me. Suppose I was a fraud like you read of in the newspapers. But the vicar at home would speak for me.”

  “Your face speaks for you,” said Katherine, and within half an hour all was settled — the old nurse telegraphed to, money found for such modest outfit as even a farmer’s housekeeper must have, the train fixed that should take the widow to London, the little hotel named where she should spend a night, and the train decided on that should take her in the morning to the farm-house that needed a housekeeper.

  “It’s no use me saying anything,” said Mrs. Burbidge, at parting, “but—”

  “There’s nothing to say,” said Katherine, and kissed her, “only you will write to the Reverend Smilie at Eccles vicarage. I can’t be easy unless you do,” were her last words.

  When she was gone they stood a moment looking at each other, and each would have liked to hold out hands to the other, to come quite close in the ecstasy of a kind deed jointly done. Instead of which he said, awkwardly:

  “I suppose that was a thoroughly silly thing to do.”

  And she answered, “Oh, well, let’s hope it will turn out all right.”

  An interchange which left both of them chilled and a little disenchanted.

  It was Edward who had the sense to say, as the motor whirled them toward Stratford, “That was all nonsense, you know, that we said just now.”

  She was disingenuous enough to say, “What—”

  “About Mrs. Burbidge perhaps not being all right. She’s as right as rain. I don’t know what made me say it.”

  “A sort of ‘do-good-by-stealth-and-blush-to-find-it-fame’ feeling, I expect, wasn’t it? Of course she’s all right. You know I knew you knew she was, don’t you?”

  “I know now,” said he. “Yes, of course I knew it. Don’t let’s pretend we aren’t both jolly glad we met her.”

  “No, don’t let’s,” said she. And laid her hand on his. His turned under it and held it, lightly yet tenderly, as his hand knew that hers would wish to be held, and not another word did either say till their car drew up at the prosperous, preposterous Shakespeare Inn at Stratford-on-Avon. But all through the drive soft currents of mutual kindness and understanding, with other electricities less easy to classify, ran from him to her and from her to him, through the contact of their quiet clasped hands.

  The inn at Stratford is intolerably half timbered. Whatever there may have been of the old woodwork is infinitely depreciated by the modern imitation which flaunts itself everywhere. The antique mockery is only skin deep and does not extend to the new rooms, each named after one of Shakespeare’s works, and all of a peculiarly unpleasing shape, and furnished exactly like the rooms of any temperance hotel. The room where Katherine washed the dust of the road from her pretty face was called “The Tempest,” and the sitting-room where they had tea was a hideous oblong furnished in the worst taste of the middle-Victorian lower middle class, and had “Hamlet” painted on its door.

  “We must see the birthplace, I suppose,” said Edward, “but before we go I should like to warn you that there is not a single authentic relic of Shakespeare, unless it’s the house where they say he was born, and even that was never said to be his birthplace till a hundred and fifty years after his death, and even then two other houses claimed the same honor. If ever a man was born in three places at once, like a bird, that man was William Shakespeare.”

  “You aren’t a Baconian, are you?” she asked, looking at him rather timidly across the teacups. “But you can’t be, because I know they’re all mad.”

  “A good many of them are very, very silly,” he owned, “but don’t be afraid. I’m not a Baconian, for Baconians are convinced that Bacon wrote the whole of Elizabethan and Jacobean literature off his own bat. I only think there’s a mystery. You remember Dickens said the life of Shakespeare was a fine mystery and he trembled daily lest something should turn up.”

  “And nothing has.”

  “Nothing. That’s just it. There’s hardly anything known about the man. He was born here — died here. He went to London and acted. One of his contemporaries says that the top of his performance was the Ghost in ‘Hamlet.’ He married, he had children, he got hold of money enough to buy a house, he got a coat of arms, he lent money and dunned people for it, he speculated in corn, he made a will in which he mentions neither his plays nor his books, but is very particular about his second-best bed and his silver-gilt bowl. He died, and was buried. That’s all that’s known about him. I’m not a Baconian, Princess, but I’m pretty sure that whoever wrote ‘Hamlet,’ that frowzy, money-grubbing provincial never did.”

  “But we’ll go and see his birthplace, all the same, won’t we?” she said.

  And they went.

  If she desired to worship at the shrine of Shakespeare he did not give her much chance. She listened to the talk of the caretaker, but always he was at her ear with the tale of how often Shakespeare’s chair had been sold and replaced by a replica, how the desk shown as his is that of an eighteenth-century usher and not of a sixteenth-century scholar. How the ring engraved “W. S.” was found in the surface of the ground, near the church, in 1810, where, one supposes, it had lain unnoticed since Shakespeare dropped it there two hundred years before.

  At the grammar-school Edward pointed out that there is no evidence to show that Shakespeare ever attended this or any other school. Anne Hathaway’s cottage could not be allowed to be Anne Hathaway’s, since it was only in 1770 that its identity was fixed on, two other houses having previously shared the honor. Like her husband, she would seem to have possessed the peculiar gift of being born in three places at once.

  “I don’t think I like it,” she said at last. “I’d rather believe everything they say. It’s such a very big lot of lies, if they are lies. Let’s go to the church. The man’s grave’s his own, I suppose.”

  “I suppose so,” said he, but not with much conviction; “anyhow, I won
’t bore you with any more of the stuff. But it is a fine mystery, and there’s a corner of me that would like to live in Bloomsbury and grub among books all day at the British Mu. and half the night in my booky little den, and see if I couldn’t find something out. But the rest of me wants different things, out-of-door things, and things that lead to something more than finding the key to a door locked three hundred years ago.”

  The bust of Shakespeare in Stratford Church is a great blow to the enthusiast. A stubby, sensual, Dutch-looking face.

  “I wish they’d been content with the gravestone,” she said, and read aloud the words:

  “Goodfrend for Jesus sake forbeare

  To digg the dust encloasèd heare

  Blest be ye man yt spares these stones

  And curst be he yt moves my bones.”

  “There’s not much chance of any one doing that — look, the altar-step goes right across the tombstone. I wonder what they would find, if they did move the stone.”

  “Nothing, madam,” said a voice behind her—”nothing human, that is.”

  She turned to face a tall, gaunt man in loose, ill-fitting clothes with a despatch-case in one hand and three or four note-books in the other. “Excuse my joining in,” he said, “but I couldn’t help hearing what you said. Whatever there is in that tomb, there is not the body of the man Shakespeare. Manuscripts there may be, but no corpse.”