Complete Novels of E Nesbit

by Edith Nesbit

  They did. And it was rather a pity, because if the young man had seen more of Jane than a large hat and a chin, and if Jane had seen the young man distinctly, either or both might have been moved to oppose Lucilla’s severe and severing tactics. I don’t quite see what either could have done — but I incline to think that the situation would have been changed.

  As it was, Jane and Lucilla paid their bill and John Rochester was left to drink gingerbeer in the sun and wonder why he couldn’t be allowed to talk for half an hour to two ladies just because no one had mumbled their names to him and his to them. He was thirsty for the companionship of women — any decent women. So that presently he carried his glass into the bar and tried to talk to the barmaid; he found a nice, respectable woman with very little conversation. Then he rode on to lunch with a wealthy uncle who had expressed a wish to see him. Later he would go down to his mother’s. He had not seen her yet. The uncle had been imperative. He wondered whether Miss Antrobus was married, and then he thought of the gold-crowned child in the moonlit wood, and wondered....

  Little did he think — as our good old standard authors would say... But volumes could be ineffectually filled by the recital of what Mr. Rochester didn’t think. The point for us is that he had seen the child again, and that she had seen him. He did not recognise her now that she wore a straw hat and the charm of nineteen instead of a crown and fifteen’s wild woodland grace. And she did not recognise the face that had come in answer to her invocation, because four years in the Red Sea set their mark upon a man, even without that scar that he got when his ship was torpedoed. They have not recognised each other, but they are in the same county; more, they are in the same district: she anchored to a house called Hope Cottage, he less closely attached, but still attached, to a resident uncle. If there is anything in these old charms the two will meet again quite soon. If there isn’t anything — well, still they will probably meet. Of course he may fall in love with Lucilla — it was she who spoke to him. If he does, we shall know that charms on St. John’s Eve are worse than useless.

  Anyhow, he is now definitely out of the picture, which concerns itself only with the desperate efforts of two inexperienced girls to establish, on the spur of the moment, a going concern that shall be at once agreeable and remunerative.

  They talked it over. The forethought of the defaulting guardian in providing an intelligent, drab-haired woman to come in and do for them left them free to talk. And talk they did. Presently talk crystallised into little lists of possibilities. As thus:

  Be milliners. Be dressmakers. Market-gardening. Keeping rabbits (“We’ve got one to begin with, anyhow,” said Lucilla). Keeping fowls. Taking paying guests. Writing novels. Going out as governesses (“Not if I know it,” said Jane. “Think of Agnes Gray”). Selling the house and furniture and going to Canada (“Too cold,” said Lucilla. “Besides, they have no old buildings,” said Jane. “Your mind would be cold there as well as your body”). Wood-carving. Going about as strolling minstrels.

  It was not an unhappy time. Freedom was theirs. They might be unlucky, but there was no one to tell them whose fault it was. The house, though small, was very comfortable, as houses are that have been lived in for years and had all that houses need gradually added, a little at a time — not crammed down their throats in one heavy, dusty meal, by a universal provider or a hire-system firm.

  The garden was full of flowers — daffodils, tulips, wallflowers, forget-me-nots, pansies, oxlips, primroses — and on the walls of the house cherry-coloured Japanese quince. The buds of iris and peonies were already fat with promise, and roses were in leaf and tiny bud.

  Twice a day a long procession of workmen passed the house, on their way to and from the new estate that was being (developed). The girls got quite used to the admiration which their garden excited in these men. As they passed every eye was turned to it. One day Jane was cutting the pyrus japonica for the house when the procession began.

  “You might spare us a buttonhole,” said a fat, jolly man with a carpenter’s bag.

  “All right,” said Jane handsomely, and handed him a little sprig of red blossom.

  “Thank you, I’m sure,” said the workman.

  “But what about me? “said the man behind him.

  “Me, too,” said another. “Give us a bit too, lady.”

  “I’m awful fond of flowers.”

  And next moment there was a crowd of men and boys holding on to the green railings of Hope Cottage, and all clamouring for just one flower. The group blocked the pathway, and newcomers stopped to see what was going on, and the crowd grew and grew.

  Jane came to the fence and raised her voice. She had learned to do that in the school plays.

  “Look here,” she said, “I’m awfully sorry, but I can’t give flowers to all of you.”

  “Never mind, miss,” said one, “we know your heart’s good.”

  “No need to give,” said a black-bearded, serious-looking man. “I’ll pay for mine.”

  “So’ll I,” said a dozen voices.

  “I was first, miss.”

  “Me next.”

  “How much?”

  “How much ought I to say?” Jane lowered her voice to ask her first friend, who had pinned her gift to his button-hole.

  “Twopence a bit,” he answered.

  Jane broke off her cherry-coloured blossom into sprays and handed them over the railings, receiving many pennies in return.

  “You ought to sell bokays, miss,” said one of the men.

  “Lots of the chaps would like to take home a bunch to the missus of a Saturday. You put up a board and say, ‘Flowers for sale here.’ Not but what it would be a pity to rob the garden.”

  “Oh, but we want to sell the flowers,” said Jane. “Thank you so much. I’ll get a board ready.”

  “I’ll bring you along a bit o’ board,” said the man with the carpenter’s bag, “all ready painted white — and you can do the letters on it yourself with Brunswick black. All saves expense.”

  When the little crowd had dispersed, Jane was left rather breathless, with blackened hands and apron-pockets weighed down with what the police call bronze.

  She heaved it all out onto the kitchen-table, where Lucilla sat busy as usual with pencil and paper. The coins rattled and rang and spun on the smooth scrubbed deal; a couple of adventurous sixpences and a rollicking halfpenny escaped to the floor, and at least three pence rolled under the dresser.

  “What on earth’s all this?” Lucilla asked, as well she might.

  “Your destiny, my destiny,” Jane told her. “It’s the finger of Fate. Drop those everlasting lists. Away with them! We’re in trade!”

  “But where did you get all this money?” Lucilla asked, beginning to arrange the pennies in piles of twelve.

  “In the garden,” said Jane dramatically; “buried treasure — first instalment, to be continued in our next. No, don’t look vacant, Luce darling. I’m not insane, and I will tell the truth as soon as I get my breath. Put away that pencil, burn that paper. No more lists! I got that money by selling flowers out of the garden. We will get our living by selling flowers out of the garden. Ourselves. To people who go by and admire. No sending our flowers to market to be sold all crushed and bruised and disheartened. ‘Fresh flowers sold here’ — that’s what’s going on the board. No, ‘Fresh cut flowers sold here.’ I shall paint the board tomorrow. Why, the board for the gate, of course, to show the world what we sell. Let’s count the money. I make it fifteen and eightpence.”

  “It is fifteen and ninepence halfpenny,” said Lucilla, and added slowly, “it’s quite a good idea, Jane.”

  “Out with it,” said Jane, adjusting the little silver tower of her eleven sixpences. “ What’s the dreadful drawback?”

  “I hate to throw cold water,” said Lucilla, “but how long will the flowers in our garden last if we sell them like this? You’ll be ‘sold out,’ as the shops say, before the paint’s dry on your board.”

  “But more
flowers will come out.”

  “Not fast enough.”

  “We could buy flowers at Covent Garden and sell those.”

  “Then they wouldn’t precisely be fresh-cut, would they?”

  “True. How right you always are!”

  “The fact is,” Lucilla went on, “you make fun of my lists — but I’ve learned one thing by making them. I see that every plan we can make for making money here is made impossible by one thing. The house is too small.”

  “Then we must get another house.”

  “That’s so easy, isn’t it, with all the papers we bought at the station full of the housing problem? There aren’t any other houses. You know there aren’t.”

  “I don’t know anything so absurd. There must be houses with bigger gardens than ours. People might want to exchange.”

  “You think we might advertise: ‘People who don’t want to be bothered with large gardens can have small one in exchange’? It’s our only chance. We can never do anything with Hope Cottage except live in it — and that we can’t do on the interest of your five hundred pounds — or else let it. Now, if we let it furnished, we could partly live somewhere else on the money.”

  “I don’t want to ‘partly’ live anywhere,” said Jane. “I wish to warm both hands before the fire of life.”

  “Well, you’ll never warm them here,” said Lucilla.

  “The worst of it is that you’re so often right,” said Jane, tying the money up in a clean blue-checked duster and hiding it in the plate-warmer. “No burglar will ever think of looking for it there. Now let’s go out and look for a house.”

  When they had locked the front door behind them Lucilla stood on the step surveying the front garden.

  “What’s-his-name and the ruins of Carthage,” said Jane, flippant, but a little uneasy too.

  Lucilla walked to the corner of the house and looked round it.

  “Why,” she said, “there’s not a flower in sight!”

  “Fifteen and eightpence,” said Jane—”I mean nine-pence, and a good deal of that was ivy.”

  “I shouldn’t put up the board here,” said Lucilla, “it’s hardly worth while.”

  “If we can’t get another house I shall plant flowers here.”

  “Flowers take time to grow.”

  “Annuals don’t — at least, not much. Let’s go and buy a gardening book and find a house.”

  They did not find a house, but they bought a gardening book — and spent the evening over it. In the kitchen. You tend to sit in the kitchen when it is very light and clean, bright with gay-coloured crockery and sparkling with silvery tinsmith’s work; and when you have it to yourselves; and when, anyhow, you have to get your own supper, and you may as well eat it where you cook it. It saves carrying trays in and out, and you get it hotter — and afterwards, why bother to move? Especially when the kitchen window looks out on the back garden, where the fruit trees are near blossom, and the parlours both look out on the front garden, the whole of whose floral splendour has just been sold for fifteen shillings and ninepence.

  A very happy evening they spent over the gardening book. Lucilla made a list of the seeds that would be wanted to carry out what was really a quite brilliant scheme for a year’s flower-growing.

  “Perhaps you’re right,” she owned; “something might be done with this garden. And then there’ll be all the soft fruit coming on in the summer.”

  “Soft fruit? Yes, that’s right, it says so in the book. Currants and raspberries and gooseberries — all the squashy kinds. Hard fruit’s the sort on trees — apples and pears. We might make jam, put ‘Home Made Jam’ on the board.”

  “And ‘New Laid Eggs’ if we only had fowls.”

  “And ‘New Milk’ if we had a cow.”

  “And ‘ Home Cured Bacon’ if we had a pig.”

  “And everything that people do sell if only we’d got room to grow it — if this were a decent-sized house instead of a chocolate-box.”

  “It’s the perfect house for an old maid,” said Jane. “A place for everything is easy, but everything you ought to have in the place where it ought to be — that’s rare, Lucy, rare as black swans. That ought to mean money. Somewhere or other there is the real right tenant gaping open-mouthed for just this bait.”

  “Bed gapes for me,” said Lucilla, “and it’s mutual.’ “I suppose being in trade does make you vulgar.” Jane seemed to ponder. “Even the little bit of trade we’ve had.”

  CHAPTER IV

  THE house stood large and lonely among a wilderness of little streets, brickfields, cabbage-fields, ruined meadows where broken hedges and a few old thorn trees lingered to remind the world of the green lanes and meadows of long ago. Long red walls, buttressed in days when the eighth Henry was king, enclosed a garden that even then had been a garden for uncounted years. The orchard and paddock, too, were ringed with the same high, heavy brickwork, but in front of the house the wall gave place to a tall railing wrought in iron of a very beautiful and graceful design, and at each end of this a double carriage gate, also of wrought iron, flanked by square brick pillars with stone coping and stone balls. A much more magnificent entourage than seemed demanded by the house itself, a dwelling comparatively modern. It could not have seen two hundred summers, and had obviously been built on the site of a much older and more magnificent mansion. Its light Italian structure showed strangely among cedars that had grown up beside the solid splendours of a Tudor dwelling. The long, low, white front of it faced the road, and the queer, squat, round tower at one corner rose against a background of yew hedges that must have been already tall when the house began to rise from its foundations.

  Though the house looked deserted it did not look decayed. There were no loose copings on the wall, and the iron screens and gates had not been suffered to rust. The weather had not yet destroyed the stucco complexion of the house, and though ivy rioted over half the green-grey of its roof, every slate was in its place.

  The wall and iron palings were strong and practically boy-proof, but the house was near enough to the road to be assailable by the skilled catapultist or the unskilled brickbat thrower. For this, or for some other reason, all the windows on the front of the house were shuttered fast, or, in the upper storey where shutters were not, frankly boarded up with rough deal. The untrimmed lawn before the house was sprinkled with daffodils and hyacinths, and beyond, through and over thick shrubberies, were glimpses of blossoming almond and thorn, and the brown haze of fruit trees covered with the gauzy veil of little buds that spring throws over wood and orchard.

  “The house was made for us,” said Jane, when they had ranged up and down the iron grating and tried both the iron gates.

  “Too big,” said Lucilla. “Besides, look at the board.”

  “That only shows that the owner’s weak-minded. We’ll apply to the Court of Chancery, or whatever it is. The Lord Chancellor will say, ‘Certainly, dears,’ or whatever Lord Chancellors do say. And we shall have the house.”

  The board, whatever weakness it stood for, was strong enough in its statements. It said in large white letters on its black self:

  THIS HOUSE IS NOT TO LET.

  Apply to:

  Messrs. P. Tutch & Co., 207, High Street.

  But the “Apply to” had been painted over by the same unskilled hand, apparently, as had painted in the wavering IS NOT.

  “I don’t care what you say.” Jane addressed not Lucilla but the board. “ I shall apply to Messrs. Tutch and Go — and I shall do it now. Come on.”

  “It’s much too big,” said Lucilla, but yielding.

  “Not for P.G.’s,” said Jane.

  “We couldn’t furnish it.”

  “Hire purchase,” Jane reminded her. “ I saw that in the paper too. You pay out of your income so that it doesn’t cost you anything. No, I don’t exactly see how — but there it is. We can’t expect to understand everything.”

  “We should want an army of gardeners.”

  “Men who’ve fou
ght in the war and got pensions too small. They can come and garden and share the profits.”

  “But when the board distinctly says that the house isn’t to let...”

  “Bother the board!” said Jane. “ I expect we shall find it doesn’t know its own wooden mind.”

  But apparently it did. Messrs. Tutch and Co. represented by a small inky boy who ate something secret out of a paper-bag throughout the interview, held out no hopes. The house was not to let. Nothing would induce the owner to let it. Yes, it had been let, but the party that had had it did something they oughtn’t — blest if he knew what — and the old gent it belonged to said no more lets for him.

  “So he went and disfigured of our board, and pays our firm so much a year to let the board stay there looking silly. No, miss, we ain’t got no other houses to let — what do you think? Could sell you one — a nice semi with bay windows, five rooms and scullery. No bath. Twelve hundred. Like to go over it?”

  “Not to-day, thank you,” said Jane, quailing, “but we’d like to go over the big house. Couldn’t we do that? What is the house called?”

  “Cedar Court. No, that you couldn’t....”

  “Not even if...” said Jane, her fingers busy with the silver meshes of her bag — one of the Guardian’s latest gifts.

  “Not if it was a hundred thousand down,” said the boy, filling his mouth. “You see,” he added with frank regret, “we ain’t got the keys at the office.”

  “Who has got the keys?”

  “Him. Himself. The old gent,” said the boy. “ He don’t let them out of his ‘ands except to the charlady as cleans up a bit sometimes. He’s close, he is.”

  “And what’s his name?” asked Jane insinuatingly.

  “Oh, go along, miss, do,” said the boy. “I ain’t going to get into trouble along of gells — coming round me like spinxes. I see your game. Worm his name and address out of a chap and then go and badger him same as you’re doing me now. Lose me my job as like as not. Good morning, miss.”

  “So that’s no good,” said Lucilla, as they walked away. “I don’t think he meant sphinxes. He meant sirens. It’s rather nice to be sirens, don’t you think?”