Complete Novels of E Nesbit

by Edith Nesbit

  “Gardening’s your special work then?”

  “It’s my trade now. It wasn’t before the war. But my people had a garden. I know all about it right enough.’ Now this pleased Mr. Rochester, because it seemed to admit that he had some claim to have explanations offered to him, and he said:

  “I’ve been at loose ends myself since the war.”

  “Ah, yes,” said Mr. Dix, “but you’ve got something to tie your loose ends to. I’ve been absolutely up against it. Nothing but unemployment allowance.”

  “Now why,” Mr. Rochester wondered, “does he tell me this?”

  “My people are in New Zealand,” Dix went on. “ I’ve had rather a stiff time, in a small way, you know. However, that’s all right. And I say... “ he hesitated. “You’re probably worrying yourself, and thinking that I’m a waster, and that your friends have been very unwise in taking a gardener out of the streets like this without even asking for a recommendation, or a character, or whatever you call it. And, if you’re feeling that, it’s no doubt making you feel uncomfortable. You needn’t be uncomfortable. That’s what I want to say. I’m all right, see? I’m not a waster. These ladies haven’t done a foolish thing in engaging me: they’ve got a gardener now, that’s one thing — and you see how the garden wants one. And I shall make this garden pay. See?”

  “I see,” said Rochester. “Thank you for explaining.”

  “There’s another thing: I know they’d never tell you, but I want to tell you that these ladies have behaved to me like... like... well, it was the most perfect thing I’ve ever seen, and I want you to know it, and to know that I know it. And it’s a thing I can never forget or think differently about. Feel more comfortable about it all now?”

  “Well, yes,” said Rochester laughing. “I think I do. Miss Quested and Miss Craye are perfectly fearless, perfectly unconventional. They are as brave and as innocent as angels. A man can’t help feeling...”

  “... Feeling inclined to surround them with barbed wire, but you can’t do it. You could never keep them in a cage. They’d break down the bars to get at anyone who needed help, and give it.”

  “I believe they would,” said Rochester, looking at Mr. Dix’s classic profile with less repulsion than he had yet felt.

  But then Jane rattled the keys and called to Mr. Dix, and as he turned back towards her Lucilla came forward and met Mr. Rochester, and said softly and confidentially:

  “I say, do you mind just coming round the garden with me while Jane shows Mr. Dix his little house? We thought he wouldn’t like it perhaps if we told him before you that he’s to have it. You see, he’s awfully poor, as well as being so nice, and one doesn’t want to rub it in and hurt his feelings.’ “You needn’t have been afraid,” said Rochester grimly. “He’s just told me that you picked him out of the gutter.”

  “Did he say that?”

  “Not exactly, but he’s not ashamed of being penniless and homeless.”

  “No, he isn’t ashamed of anything. He hasn’t any Bluebeard chambers. That’s what’s so fine about him, isn’t it? And isn’t he awfully good-looking? “Lucilla could not refrain from allowing herself this little malicious pleasure.

  “A perfect Adonis,” said Mr. Rochester. And you cannot wonder that he liked Mr. Dix less than he had done five minutes before.

  CHAPTER XVIII

  Jane opened her eyes next day wrapped in the tatters of a dream in which she had been tried by a jury consisting of eleven Mr. Dixes and Othello, and found guilty of black ingratitude in the first degree. The judge, who was Mr. John Rochester dressed as Hamlet with plumes on his head such as hearse-horses wear, sentenced her to be stoned. So she stood up against the wall of the round tower of Cedar Court and the jury threw stones, and all the stones turned to rose-leaves — red and pink and white and yellow and bronze and coral and crimson — and made the ground all round her into the loveliest velvet carpet under which she hastened to hide herself. And when she woke she thought at first that the rose-leaf carpet was still there, but it was only the old, soft, thin velvet patchwork of her bed-quilt, touched to new living glories by the morning sunshine.

  The dream was gone, but the dreamer reflected, as she dressed, that the dream-jury had been right. Was it not black ingratitude to shrink from the sudden granting of one’s dearest dream? To cry for the moon, and then to grumble because the moon was bigger than the silver shilling it sometimes looks like? To covet Cedar Court, to desire it above all things, to cherish a secret resentment against the Fate which denied it and — then when Cedar Court, suddenly and without reservation, was granted, to shy at it as a nervous horse will at a sieve of oats too suddenly proffered?

  Cedar Court was big? The more scope for enterprise! A whole new scheme of life would be needed? What better game could there be than inventing new schemes of life?

  Inspirited by these reflections, Jane ran downstairs whistling Mendelssohn’s “I would that my love,” very late for breakfast, very hungry, and very cheerful.

  Lucilla, who had had no dreams, was busy at the rosewood table in the window with account books and pencil and scribbled scraps of paper.

  “It’s nearly the half-hour,” she said reproachfully. “I’ve fed Othello, Mrs. Doveton is keeping the bacon hot — but you know how it frizzles up in the oven till there’s nothing left — and look here, Jane, we’ve spent over a hundred pounds already, as well as what we’ve made out of the shop. We’re on the road to ruin — and now that big house to keep up.”

  “Away with melancholy,” replied Jane, “nor doleful changes ring! I’ll fetch the bacon. Pour out the coffee, sweet angel.” And so, whistling, to the kitchen.

  “I don’t see what you’ve got to be so jolly about,” said Lucilla when she came back. “One never knows what to be up to with you. You went to bed last night as dismal as a crow, and so was I — all the responsibilities of that great house, and Mr. Rochester interfering and being jealous..

  “That would be a great liberty on Mr. Rochester’s part,” said Jane, helping herself to bacon — which was not chippy after all, because Mrs. Doveton had artfully kept it hot, not in the oven, but over a saucepan of boiling water—”a perfectly unwarrantable liberty. The bacon’s not half bad.”

  “I wish you wouldn’t always interrupt,” said Lucilla. “ I was saying that you were quite miserable last night, and well you might be. That house — and Mr. Dix on our hands and Mr. Rochester behaving like a bear! It’s too much! And you thought so too, and now this morning you come down as jolly as a sandboy and only say, ‘Away with melancholy’ when I tell you what a frightful lot of money we’ve spent.”

  “Do you want me to go on being miserable? Always? That’s too heartless of you, Luce. But you don’t, do you?”

  “I want you to be serious. You said last night that this was a crisis in our affairs and that we must seriously think whether it wouldn’t be better to go on as we are.”

  “We can’t. I didn’t see that last night — but you can never go on as you are. Things go on changing all the time, and you’ve got to change with them. Like chameleons. For the future I’m going to be a chameleon. Like this.” She made a grimace intended to represent the repellent expression of that reptile.

  “I do wish you’d be serious. Honey, please, and the toast. Thank you,” said Lucilla, quite crossly.

  “Well, I will! Seriously, then, of course I know we were dismal last night, but why should we go on being? This isn’t last night. It’s this morning. We’ve been asleep for nine or ten hours. That’s what sleep’s for — to wash all the grumpiness and cowardliness and fuss away. And it does, and the little cherub wakes up as bright as a button. We lost our heads a little last night, and lost sight of our guiding principle. The great fact of life. Life is a lark — all the parts of it, I mean, that are generally treated seriously: money, and worries about money, and not being sure what’s going to happen. Looked at rightly, all that’s an adventure, a lark. As long as you have enough to eat and to wear and a roof to s
leep under, the whole thing’s a lark. Life is a lark for us, and we must treat it as such.”

  “It isn’t a lark to the people who haven’t got enough to eat and wear and sleep under,” said Lucilla.

  “Isn’t that exactly what I’m saying? We have. And for us it is. As for the other people, all we can do is to help them when we come across them, and to keep going ourselves, or else we shan’t be able to help anyone else. To make one blade of grass grow where two grew before.”

  “That’s Mr. Dix’s job.”

  “I meant the opposite, of course,” said Jane, laughing: “two where one grew before. That’s what old Gravy used to say. Upon my word, as I get on in years I begin to see that old Gravy was not wrong nearly so often as we used to think. Grown-up people often aren’t, I daresay. You remember the other thing she always used to write in our albums:

  ‘ Do the work that’s nearest Though it’s dull at whiles —

  Helping, when you meet them.

  Lame dogs over stiles.’

  The work that’s nearest us is making Cedar Court into a paying concern. And whatever else it turns out to be, it won’t be dull. Cheer up, my lovely Lucy. We have two houses — four if we count the cottages, and five if you count the summer-house. We have youth, health, strength, good looks — oh yes, we have — nearly four hundred pounds in the bank, a really excellent rabbit, and the handsomest gardener in Europe.”

  “And kind Mr. Rochester always at hand to help us with his advice. Jane, do you think you could ever marry a thoroughly bad-tempered man?”

  Jane got up and looked at herself in the glass over the sideboard.

  “We are good-looking,” she said, as one ending an argument. “You’re very good-looking — and I’m not half bad in my foxy, sharp-faced way. What was that you said about marrying? No, never mind. We mustn’t think about marrying, or young men, or love, or any of that nonsense till we’ve succeeded in business.”

  “We seem to be surrounding ourselves with young men,” said Lucilla. “Even Simmons is young. We must think of them.”

  “But not like that,” said Jane firmly. “Mr. Dix is a gardener. Mr. Rochester is... By the way, I’m not going to call him Mr. Rochester any more. Why should he be set up on pedestals? If Uncle James is good enough for our aged benefactor, Nephew John is good enough for our young paint-re mover. Nephew John! I shall call him that for the future.”

  “To his face?”

  “Of course,” said Jane ironically, “every time. Come on — we must get down to the shop. We can go on talking there.”

  “You,” said Lucilla, finishing the last of the toast, “can go on talking anywhere.”

  “Cat!” said Jane calmly. “What was it the cook called Gladys when they had that row about the rag-and-bottle man? ‘Cat! Fish-faced cat!’”

  Thus on the morning after their accession to the crown of their dreams did the two angels of Mr. Dix and Mr. Rochester ingenuously converse.

  Mr. Rochester meanwhile was deciding with belated tact to leave Cedar Court alone for two or three days, or at least for a day or two — or for this day at any rate. Mr. Dix was toiling at the tennis-lawn, having by candlelight prepared a long list of seeds and plants, which he presented to Jane when she strolled down about twelve o’clock with a full jug held carefully and the announcement that she had just come to see how he was getting on.

  “It’s only cold tea,” she said. “I know gardeners generally drink beer all the time out of round earthenware bottles. Only we haven’t any beer. There’s lemon in the tea though. You’ll have to drink out of the jug. It isn’t bad.”

  “I should jolly well think it wasn’t!” he answered, lifting his flushed face from a long pull at the jug. “I think you have the most beautiful ideas of anyone I ever knew. Fancy you thinking of beer!”

  “We only thought of it,” she protested; “what really happened was tea.”

  “Ah, but the idea was a great one. You hitched your wagon to a star. Look here, can I have these, or some of them?” he added hastily, seeing her eye travel down about ten inches of careful handwriting.

  “If it’s necessary, of course. But I thought you only sowed things in the spring?”

  “These are for the winter and for next year,” he said.

  “But — I expect you’ll get something much better quite soon. You know we can’t afford to pay you anything like what you’re worth. Do you think it’s worth while to start a lot of things?... you see, we shouldn’t know how to deal with them if you suddenly went to edit a poetry book, or write elegies, for the people who can afford luxuries.”

  “Look here,” said he; “sit down for a minute under this apple-tree, will you? Now look here. I’ve got something to propose. Don’t think me impertinent — but do you mind telling me if the place is yours?”

  “Oh no,” said Jane, “I wish it was.”

  “What a pity! Have you the lease then?”

  “No, but we’ve got it for five years if we like. We had a letter telling us so yesterday. And if we want to we can go on having it.”

  “You ought to have that letter stamped,” said the young man with the classic profile. “ And even then I don’t know that it would be binding without a signed agreement.”

  “We’re to have that too. A lawyer is making it. The letter said so.”

  “Well, then,” began Mr. Dix eagerly, “my idea is this..

  But Jane stopped him neatly.

  “No, no,” she said. “I’m dying to hear it, but it’s not fair on Lucilla — and we can’t both leave the shop at the same time. That’s the only sickening thing about keeping a shop — someone has to be always in it, ready to sell, even if there’s nobody in it who wants to buy. And it’s so dull for one person alone that we both have to be there all the time, and so neither of us has any time to do anything else. And how we shall manage now we’ve got the whole house as well as the garden room... But look here, we’ll bring lunch down here, shall we, and have a council of war?”

  “I’ve got some milk and bread and butter and cheese,” said Mr. Dix, “and lettuce.”

  “All right, bring them along,” said Jane, returning reluctantly to Lucilla and duty.

  So, under the apple-tree, with the little green apples falling on the dishes and on the heads of the talkers, the council of war was held.

  Jane opened it, of course.

  “Now, Mr. Dix, here we all are,” she said, “and do smoke if you want to, and then tell us what your great idea is.”

  “The idea is that we should go into a sort of partnership. No, not that exactly. You see, I don’t know. Perhaps what I’m proposing is only silly. I can’t help thinking that you’re not rich. And yet you have this house and garden. And yet you’re selling flowers, so you must want money. And yet...”

  “Don’t,” said Jane, “I’ll tell you. Don’t go on guessing. Our relations left us enough money to do nothing on — think how dull that would have been! Then our guardian bolted with the money. He only left us £500 and a little house that belonged to Lucy’s aunt. Then we began to sell flowers. Then an old gentleman who used to be a friend of Lucy’s aunt gave us leave to use the garden and the garden room here and to sell the flowers. Then we got a gardener to do a little and put in a few seeds. Then we met you. Then the old gentleman was pleased with us about some panelling we cleaned, and he’s lent us the house to do what we like with for five years or longer if we like. That’s our life-story in three words. You see, it was like this...” She continued and elaborated her theme in words that lasted a cigarette and a half with interjections from Lucilla, who at last said:

  “Yes, and now we haven’t got quite four hundred.”

  “And I haven’t anything but plans and energy and some experience,” said Mr. Dix. “You said the other day that you were born lucky, Miss Quested. Perhaps you’re one of those people who succeed in everything they touch, always. I’m not. But sometimes I succeed — and I always know when I’m going to. More than once in France...” he st
opped, and asked almost instantly, “And you — what were your plans?”

  “We thought if we could get a gardener we could grow more things to sell, but now we’ve suddenly got Cedar Court we thought of having Pigs — P.G.’s, you know, Paying Guests. I should think anyone would be glad to live in a place like this. But then if we have Pigs — I mean P.G.’s — we can’t be always in the shop, and even as it is...”

  “Exactly,” said Mr. Dix. “Now, you’ve got one thing you wanted: you’ve got a gardener. And you’ll get your P.G.’s all right if you want them. The difficulty at present is money. I can run this garden properly — sell the fruit and vegetables that you don’t want for the shop to Covent Garden. But I can’t do it alone. I should want two men at once for at least a month and a boy as well. That’ll be two pounds ten a week each for the men and a pound for the boy. I can do on a pound a week easily — having nothing to buy but my food. But I should have to have a few pounds to get my clothes out of pawn. You can’t do anything serious with this garden without putting a certain amount of money into it. The garden will get worse and worse and you’ll get less and less flowers. Even if you gave up the shop and devoted yourselves entirely to the P.G.’s, the garden would have to be kept tidy, and it may as well pay its way anyhow. Now that’s my idea. When it pays we can discuss the question of my wages again. I’ve thought it all over very carefully, and this is the only way I see of making the thing pay. It’s no use my taking your money and just going on trying to keep down the weeds. It’s the whole hog or none.”

  “Do you mean that if we don’t agree to this you won’t go on being our gardener?” said Lucilla sweetly.

  “You know I don’t. I’m not holding a pistol at your heads. Of course I’ll go on, on any terms you like. Only if I’m just grubbing along, keeping the place roughly tidy and not really doing anything to help you, I shall do my best, of course, but I shall only work with half a heart. Whereas if I know that I’m really helping to pull the cart along, and making the money out of this land that ought to be made out of it, I shall work like the — like anything. Well, that’s my idea; think it over. I’ll get back to work.”