Complete Novels of E Nesbit

by Edith Nesbit

  “We couldn’t do that, anyhow, without a chaperone.” You see how very old-fashioned Lucilla was.

  “Yes, we could — matinees,” said Jane, who was old-fashioned too. “They’re quite respectable. The only difficulty is the shop. Really business people never leave the shop.”

  “I’ve sometimes thought,” said Lucilla, “that perhaps there’s something almost slavish about our opening the shop on Mondays. We took ninepence last Monday and one-and-a-penny the Monday before, and the Monday before that we took nothing, and I lost my green bag coming down with two shillings and a pair of perfectly good gloves in it.”

  “You’re quite right,” said Jane, “we mustn’t make an idol of the shop. That’s bowing down to Mammon, and you end in frock-coats and top-hats, and buying up the country seats of impoverished county families, and being road-hogs, and getting titles if you bow down long enough. Business is a good servant but a bad master. I’m sure I’ve read that somewhere. Look here, we’ll take a holiday next Monday — at least, a half-holiday. We took that one-and-ninepence in the morning. We’ll open the shop from nine to twelve, and then we’ll go to London and see life.”

  “Where shall we go?”

  “We’ll write all the places we want to go to on bits of paper and put them in a hat and shut our eyes and draw fair.”

  They did — only instead of putting the papers in a hat they put them in a Lowestoft bowl, and each drew a paper.

  “Mine’s the National Gallery,” said Jane, in rather a disappointed voice; “and I wrote it myself, too. Serves me right.”

  “Mine’s Madame Tussaud’s,” said Lucilla.

  “Oh, well,” said Jane, cheering up, “we’ll go there first. I’ve never seen any waxworks and I’ve always wanted to most frightfully, ever since we read ‘The Power of Darkness.’ You remember about the young man who betted he would spend a night alone with the waxworks, and when it was dark one of the wax things moved or came alive or something? Oh — horrible!” —

  “We’d certainly better go there first,” said Lucilla. “I don’t think I should like those things at night — the guillotines, and Marie Antoinette’s head, and Marat in his bath, and all the murderers. Do you remember that catalogue Kate Somers had? And she used to read bits out of it and make up stories to fit, till the little ones were afraid to go to bed. There was one horrible tale, do you remember, about poor little Madame Tussaud having to make wax models of the heads of kings and queens and people — just the heads — loose — no bodies you know — just as they came fresh from the guillotine? It must have been a nasty business — all the blood.”

  “Shut up!” said Jane firmly, “or you’ll be afraid to go to bed. I know you! I’m not at all sure that I shall allow you to see the Chamber of Horrors at all.”

  “I’m not sure that I want to,” Lucilla retorted.

  But when they stood on the brink of the Chamber of Horrors she felt otherwise.

  After a most interesting ride on the top of a tram, a luncheon consisting almost entirely of cream buns, éclairs, ices and tea, and a really exciting journey by Tubes, on which neither had ever travelled before, they came to the big building in Baker Street, and made a leisurely progress through the Halls of Fame, where Byron and Bottomley, Dan Leno and Father Bernard Vaughan, Voltaire, Mrs. Siddons, and Lady Jane Grey compete for the notice of the visitor with those waxen faces that would be exactly lifelike if they were not so exactly like death. They saw Luther and Mary Queen of Scots next-door neighbours, and Burns not too proud to be next door but one to Sir Thomas Lipton. They saw the Grand Hall and the Hall of Kings, which Jane said was like a very nice history lesson. It was when they paused at last before the Coronation Robes of Napoleon and Josephine that Jane said: “I’ve had enough. Let’s get out. I’m beginning to feel as if these people were alive and just going to speak to us.”

  “We’d better see the Chamber of Horrors now we are here,” said Lucilla.

  “Well, don’t blame me!” said Jane elliptically, and they went forward with new vigour. But when they came out of the Chamber of Horrors even Jane was pale, and Lucilla said:

  “It’s very much more horrible than you’d think it possibly could be. They’re only wood and wax and cloth, and their eyes that seem to look at you are only glass eyes. At least... well, if I were to stay in there long I shouldn’t be sure of that or anything else. They’re uncanny; there’s a sort of horrible magic about them.”

  “That’s your highly-strung nature, my child. They’re really only wax and glass and wood and clothes and stuffing — just dolls with murderous faces. Well, I don’t like the heads myself. But I’ll tell you what I think is really much more horrible, in a way.”

  “Oh, what?” said Lucilla, almost in a whisper.

  “Well, I think,” said Jane, “that the most horrible thing is the ordinary people, standing and sitting about — they really are lifelike; some of the others are rather too like life to be quite lifelike and rather too dead for you to want to be alone with them in the dark. But the other ones — I don’t really like them, even in broad daylight. Look at that one on the seat there — just a hard-up, tired boy — shabby clothes, worn shoes — all complete — just like life, and yet it’s much more like... Oh, I don’t know!”

  “That’s not wax,” said Lucilla, “that’s real.”

  “It does almost look like it,” Jane confessed, “but you can tell by the hands. That sort of waxy pale yellow — that’s what gives it away. Come close and look if you don’t believe me.”

  They went close to the figure on the red velvet bench, which certainly represented with extraordinary fidelity a tired youth asleep, head dropped on the breast, arms folded, waxen white hands on the sleeves of a very shabby coat.

  “There’s one mistake though,” Jane pointed out. “If he was real and as shabby as that, his hands and nails wouldn’t be so beautifully clean.”

  She sat down on the bench by the figure with Lucilla on her other side.

  “I believe it is real,” Lucilla persisted, “and I don’t like it. I mean I don’t like its being so like real if it’s only wax. It is real, Jane — come away!”

  “It isn’t,” said Jane, “ look here! “ and she caught in her hand the arm of the wax figure.

  Of course you are prepared to hear that the figure sprang to its feet, and that it was not wax, but neither you nor anyone else could have been prepared for the shriek with which the wax figure leapt up, nor the answering shriek which Jane contributed when the wax figure came to life, so to speak, in her hands.

  The man who had been wax, and the girl who had been so sure that he was nothing else, stood staring at each other.

  “What was it? Did I call out?” he asked.

  “Ye — ye — yes,” said Lucilla.

  And then a custodian was upon them asking questions, and a vista opened up of possible unpleasantness for everybody.

  “What’s the matter, miss?” he asked, as one who has a right to know. “ This young man been annoying you?”

  “Certainly not,” said Jane, with an almost convulsive but successful clutch at her self-possession. “We were only laughing.”

  “Funny sort of laugh,” said the custodian sourly.

  “It does sound so to strangers,” Jane explained; “ all our family laugh like that,” she added a little wildly.

  “You know the young man then?” said the custodian grudgingly.

  “Of course I do,” said Jane. “He’s my brother, and he fell asleep and I woke him up and then we all laughed. It’s nothing to make a fuss about. Come along, Bill, or we shall be late for tea and Aunt Emma will be furious.”

  She actually, as she wondered afterwards to remember, took the arm of the stranger and led him away from the ‘house of the pale-fronted images’. The three moved in a stricken silence, the young man walking as in a dream, and it was not till they were a couple of hundred yards down the road that he spoke, and his voice was a very pleasant one.

  “How splendi
d of you! How you carried it off!”

  “I appear to be carrying you off,” said Jane, “but it seemed the only way. That man had prison and fines and all sorts of things in his eye. I don’t know what they can do to you for screaming in public buildings, but, whatever it is, that man would have seen to it that they did it.”

  “Such presence of mind,” said the youth — he was hardly more—”and so very, very decent of you to rescue me. I don’t deserve it, after frightening you like that with my yells. But I was dreaming, and something woke me up suddenly.”

  “I did,” said Jane, “and then I yelled. We’d been frightening ourselves with the Chamber of Horrors — and then.., Well, you see, it was like this...”

  “You can’t stand here explaining things on the pavement — everybody’s staring at us. Let’s go and have some tea — yes, now,” said Lucilla strongly, though her voice trembled, “and you can explain sitting down.”

  “Yes, let’s.” Jane welcomed the suggestion, for the arm she held was actually trembling and her own heart was still beating wildly. “I’m sure we all need something to revive us after the shock of being screamed at by each other.”

  “I didn’t scream,” Lucilla reminded her.

  “No,” said Jane, “but you said, ‘Ye-ye-ye-yes-s,’ and nearly gave the show away. Besides, you’d nothing to scream about. We had. There must be thousands of tea-shops about here. You will come and have tea with us and let us explain?” she urged her captive, who murmured, “If you’ll let me. You’re too good. I don’t want to be a nuisance...” and yielded.

  “And of course,” said Jane, ending her explanation with her elbows on the marble-topped table among the tea-cups, “if we hadn’t been frightening ourselves with murderers, and Marat in his bath, and guillotined heads, and muddling ourselves with whether things were wax or weren’t, I shouldn’t have grabbed you like that and you wouldn’t have yelled, and then I shouldn’t have yelled either. And anyhow, I can’t think how I could have been so silly.”

  “If you come to that, what makes people so silly as to go to waxworks when they know they’re going to be frightened?” Lucilla asked.

  “I went because my landlady gave me a ticket,” said their new friend, “and it seemed a good place to rest in. I didn’t mean to be frightened.”

  “We went because we drew it out of a hat,” said Lucilla; “and we didn’t exactly mean to be frightened either — we came out expressly on a pleasure hunt.”

  “I’ve been hunting too — but mine’s for work,” said the young man; “and I was so unsuccessful and so weary that I felt I must sit down or die. And as I had the ticket I postponed my decease. And then sleep came over me,” he went on absently, “and I dreamed I was in prison again — and when you caught my arm I thought you were... Oh, it was really too overwhelming.”

  “Have another cup of tea,” said Jane, with sudden and not too overwhelming tact. She felt that she must speak before her own silence and Lucilla’s had time to become embarrassing. “And those little fat cakes are quite good, do try one.” To herself she was saying: “This is what comes of making friends with strangers. How awful! But how frightfully thrilling too! Prison! Just out of it, I expect! That’s why he can’t get work. How dreadful for him!” She looked across the table at the thin face of the young man, at his fair hair, with the one long lock that would drop over his blue eyes — at his thin, delicate mouth and finely-cut chin. How dreadful it was that a young man — such a young man — should have every gate closed to him, should be unable to get back into honesty, just because he had been in prison — perhaps not for anything very bad. She was sure that with that face he had not done anything very bad. She must say something, or he would see that he had let out about his having been in prison, and then he would get up and go, and they would never be able to help him. And Jane felt that they must help him. Fate had thrown him and them together in such a very marked manner; it was as if Fate meant them to help him. And they would. She must think of a way. But also she must speak again, for the young man had only said, “Thank you,” for the cup of tea, and Lucilla’s silence was becoming monumental.

  “What sort of work were you looking for?” Jane asked gently.

  “Anything,” he said, “but I’d rather not go into an office. I feel as though I could not endure the confinement after —— —”

  “I understand,” Jane interrupted, “but what would you like to do, if you had your choice — what do you think you do best?”

  He laughed and put back that lock of hair.

  “I think I write verses best,” he said, “and sometimes I even think I don’t do them badly, but the world is not of my opinion — yet. As to what I would like to do — well, one has one’s dreams, of course...

  “I beg your pardon,” said Jane, stiffening, “I didn’t mean to be inquisitive.”

  “You aren’t. You couldn’t be. It’s only too gracious of you to take the faintest interest. All I meant was that my dreams would waste too much of your time if I let myself begin to bore you with them. Besides, I must not dream any more for a long time. I must work. And I would rather work out of doors.”

  Lucilla was still saying nothing so carefully that Jane, without looking at her, knew that she was in an agony of anxiety as to how they should get rid of this new and shockingly undesirable acquaintance. This inexplicably deepened her own resolve not to get rid of him, but to stand by him in his trouble as one human being should stand by another.

  “Out of doors?” she repeated. “Do you mean farm work or...” She smiled encouragingly at him. (Poor fellow, who knew how long it was since anyone had smiled at him? she thought.)

  “I was really thinking of gardening,” he said, smiling back at her. “ I would be contented with quite small wages. I want to be out of doors. I want to get strong again after... I was brought up in Kent. My people had a farm. I know a good bit about gardens. I suppose you don’t know anyone who wants a gardener?”

  “Yes,” said Jane resolutely, “ we do!”

  Then Lucilla spoke.

  “Oh, Jane,” she said, “how can you!”

  “I beg your pardon? “said Jane, with frigid politeness. “I mean,” Lucilla tried to explain, “we hadn’t really decided on a gardener, had we? And I don’t know that we can afford it.”

  “You see” — Jane turned to the self-confessed jail-bird with a smile nicely calculated to efface anything that might have been unpleasing in Lucilla’s words—”my friend is determined not to make a stranger of you. I assure you it isn’t everyone she’d talk to about our poverty.”

  The silky smooth tone and the sweet smile should have warned Lucilla; long experience at school might have taught her to recognise the symptoms of Jane at bay — or, rather, Jane with the bit between her teeth. But Lucilla was not quite her acutest self. The waxworks had set her nerves tingling and twittering, and she said:

  “I didn’t mean to talk about our poverty or anything of the sort.”

  “I know,” said Jane, affecting sympathy, “ but one gets led away into these sort of confidences, doesn’t one, with congenial people? I feel just the same myself. Now I was going to suggest that Mr. — ?” She turned to him with raised, interrogative eyebrows.

  “Dix,” said he.

  “Thank you. My name is Quested and my friend’s is Craye. I was going to suggest that Mr. Dix should give us his address and we should write to him; then we should have quietly talked over our means between ourselves, you know, Luce dear, and decided what we could or couldn’t afford. But since you’ve taken Mr. Dix into our confidence so fully, dear Luce, concealment is at an end, and Mr. Dix may as well come and talk it over with us. Could you come to tea, Mr. Dix? Next Sunday? Cedar Court, Leabridge, S.E.”

  “Please don’t worry about the gardening idea,” said Mr. Dix, looking from Jane to Lucilla. “Of course I should be enchanted to be allowed to come to tea, but are you sure... I don’t want to be a bore.”

  “Reassure Mr. Dix, Lucy darling,�
�� said Jane. “Tell him how pleased we shall be.”

  Lucilla found it impossible to avoid saying how pleased she would be — but she eyed Jane like a basilisk.

  “And now,” said Jane, carrying off the situation with graceful aplomb, “we must go and catch trains. And we expect you on Sunday. I think Destiny’s certainly meant you to be friends with us. One doesn’t exchange yells with perfect strangers every day, does one?”

  “Such happy fortune as mine certainly doesn’t happen every day,” said the youth, with a kind of formal gallantry not at all unpleasing. “Thank you a thousand times for your goodness,” he said, taking the hand Jane offered. “And you,” he said, offering his to Lucilla — and there was a gleam in his blue eyes that looked not exactly malicious, but a little elfish. Jane perceived that he had done full justice to Lucilla’s reluctance.

  CHAPTER XI

  You cannot quarrel comfortably in the street, nor in the Tube, but a third-class railway carriage, if you have it to yourselves, offers every facility for recriminations.

  Jane replied with chill venom to Lucilla’s intense reproaches and assured her that she had only herself to thank.

  “It is entirely owing to you,” she said several times, “that this youthful jail-bird is coming to peck at our seedcake. I should only have written to him, as I said. But I was obliged to make up for your — forgive me if I say rudeness.”

  “I believe you go out of your mind sometimes,” Lucilla repeated more than once; “the things you do — the things you say!”

  Jane replied.

  Lucilla retorted.

  And so on. You know the sort of thing?

  But between London Bridge and New Cross, Jane suddenly laughed.