Complete Novels of E Nesbit

by Edith Nesbit

  ‘Oh, dear,’ sighed Maurice the cat. ‘I never knew what people meant by “afraid” before.’

  His cat-heart was beating heavily against his furry side. His limbs were getting cramped — he must move. He did. And instantly the awful thing happened. The sardine-tin touched the iron of the bed-foot. It rattled.

  ‘Oh, I can’t bear it, I can’t,’ cried poor Maurice, in a heartrending meaow that echoed through the house. He leaped from the bed and tore through the door and down the stairs, and behind him came the most terrible thing in the world. People might call it a sardine-tin, but he knew better. It was the soul of all the fear that ever had been or ever could be. It rattled.

  Maurice who was a cat flew down the stairs; down, down — the rattling horror followed. Oh, horrible! Down, down! At the foot of the stairs the horror, caught by something — a banister — a stair-rod — stopped. The string on Maurice’s tail tightened, his tail was jerked, he was stopped. But the noise had stopped too. Maurice lay only just alive at the foot of the stairs.

  It was Mabel who untied the string and soothed his terrors with strokings and tender love-words. Maurice was surprised to find what a nice little girl his sister really was.

  ‘I’ll never tease you again,’ he tried to say, softly — but that was not what he said. What he said was ‘Purrrr.’

  ‘Dear pussy, nice poor pussy, then,’ said Mabel, and she hid away the sardine-tin and did not tell any one. This seemed unjust to Maurice until he remembered that, of course, Mabel thought that he was really Lord Hugh, and that the person who had tied the tin to his tail was her brother Maurice. Then he was half grateful. She carried him down, in soft, safe arms, to the kitchen, and asked cook to give him some milk.

  ‘Tell me to change back into Maurice,’ said Maurice who was quite worn out by his cattish experiences. But no one heard him. What they heard was, ‘Meaow — Meaow — Meeeaow!’

  Then Maurice saw how he had been tricked. He could be changed back into a boy as soon as any one said to him, ‘Leave off being a cat and be Maurice again,’ but his tongue had no longer the power to ask any one to say it.

  He did not sleep well that night. For one thing he was not accustomed to sleeping on the kitchen hearthrug, and the blackbeetles were too many and too cordial. He was glad when cook came down and turned him out into the garden, where the October frost still lay white on the yellowed stalks of sunflowers and nasturtiums. He took a walk, climbed a tree, failed to catch a bird, and felt better. He began also to feel hungry. A delicious scent came stealing out of the back kitchen door. Oh, joy, there were to be herrings for breakfast! Maurice hastened in and took his place on his usual chair.

  His mother said, ‘Down, puss,’ and gently tilted the chair so that Maurice fell off it. Then the family had herrings. Maurice said, ‘You might give me some,’ and he said it so often that his father, who, of course, heard only mewings, said: —

  ‘For goodness’ sake put that cat out of the room.’

  Maurice breakfasted later, in the dust-bin, on herring heads.

  But he kept himself up with a new and splendid idea. They would give him milk presently, and then they should see.

  He spent the afternoon sitting on the sofa in the dining-room, listening to the conversation of his father and mother. It is said that listeners never hear any good of themselves. Maurice heard so much that he was surprised and humbled. He heard his father say that he was a fine, plucky little chap, but he needed a severe lesson, and Dr. Strongitharm was the man to give it to him. He heard his mother say things that made his heart throb in his throat and the tears prick behind those green cat-eyes of his. He had always thought his parents a little bit unjust. Now they did him so much more than justice that he felt quite small and mean inside his cat-skin.

  ‘He’s a dear, good, affectionate boy,’ said mother. ‘It’s only his high spirits. Don’t you think, darling, perhaps you were a little hard on him?’

  ‘It was for his own good,’ said father.

  ‘Of course,’ said mother; ‘but I can’t bear to think of him at that dreadful school.’

  ‘Well —— ,’ father was beginning, when Jane came in with the tea-things on a clattering tray, whose sound made Maurice tremble in every leg. Father and mother began to talk about the weather.

  Maurice felt very affectionately to both his parents. The natural way of showing this was to jump on to the sideboard and thence on to his father’s shoulders. He landed there on his four padded feet, light as a feather, but father was not pleased.

  ‘Bother the cat!’ he cried. ‘Jane, put it out of the room.’

  Maurice was put out. His great idea, which was to be carried out with milk, would certainly not be carried out in the dining-room. He sought the kitchen, and, seeing a milk-can on the window-ledge, jumped up beside the can and patted it as he had seen Lord Hugh do.

  ‘My!’ said a friend of Jane’s who happened to be there, ‘ain’t that cat clever — a perfect moral, I call her.’

  ‘He’s nothing to boast of this time,’ said cook. ‘I will say for Lord Hugh he’s not often taken in with a empty can.’

  This was naturally mortifying for Maurice, but he pretended not to hear, and jumped from the window to the tea-table and patted the milk-jug.

  ‘Come,’ said the cook, ‘that’s more like it,’ and she poured him out a full saucer and set it on the floor.

  Now was the chance Maurice had longed for. Now he could carry out that idea of his. He was very thirsty, for he had had nothing since that delicious breakfast in the dust-bin. But not for worlds would he have drunk the milk. No. He carefully dipped his right paw in it, for his idea was to make letters with it on the kitchen oil-cloth. He meant to write: ‘Please tell me to leave off being a cat and be Maurice again,’ but he found his paw a very clumsy pen, and he had to rub out the first ‘P’ because it only looked like an accident. Then he tried again and actually did make a ‘P’ that any fair-minded person could have read quite easily.

  ‘I wish they’d notice,’ he said, and before he got the ‘l’ written they did notice.

  ‘Drat the cat,’ said cook; ‘look how he’s messing the floor up.’

  And she took away the milk.

  Maurice put pride aside and mewed to have the milk put down again. But he did not get it.

  Very weary, very thirsty, and very tired of being Lord Hugh, he presently found his way to the schoolroom, where Mabel with patient toil was doing her home-lessons. She took him on her lap and stroked him while she learned her French verb. He felt that he was growing very fond of her. People were quite right to be kind to dumb animals. Presently she had to stop stroking him and do a map. And after that she kissed him and put him down and went away. All the time she had been doing the map, Maurice had had but one thought: Ink!

  The moment the door had closed behind her — how sensible people were who closed doors gently — he stood up in her chair with one paw on the map and the other on the ink. Unfortunately, the inkstand top was made to dip pens in, and not to dip paws. But Maurice was desperate. He deliberately upset the ink — most of it rolled over the table-cloth and fell pattering on the carpet, but with what was left he wrote quite plainly, across the map: —

  ‘Please tell Lord Hugh to stop being a cat and be Mau rice again.’

  ‘There!’ he said; ‘they can’t make any mistake about that.’ They didn’t. But they made a mistake about who had done it, and Mabel was deprived of jam with her supper bread.

  Her assurance that some naughty boy must have come through the window and done it while she was not there convinced nobody, and, indeed, the window was shut and bolted.

  Maurice, wild with indignation, did not mend matters by seizing the opportunity of a few minutes’ solitude to write: —

  ‘It was not Mabel it was Maur ice I mean Lord Hugh,’

  because when that was seen Mabel was instantly sent to bed.

  ‘It’s not fair!’ cried Maurice.

  ‘My dear,’ said Maurice�
�s father, ‘if that cat goes on mewing to this extent you’ll have to get rid of it.’

  Maurice said not another word. It was bad enough to be a cat, but to be a cat that was ‘got rid of’! He knew how people got rid of cats. In a stricken silence he left the room and slunk up the stairs — he dared not mew again, even at the door of Mabel’s room. But when Jane went in to put Mabel’s light out Maurice crept in too, and in the dark tried with stifled mews and purrs to explain to Mabel how sorry he was. Mabel stroked him and he went to sleep, his last waking thought amazement at the blindness that had once made him call her a silly little kid.

  If you have ever been a cat you will understand something of what Maurice endured during the dreadful days that followed. If you have not, I can never make you understand fully. There was the affair of the fishmonger’s tray balanced on the wall by the back door — the delicious curled-up whiting; Maurice knew as well as you do that one mustn’t steal fish out of other people’s trays, but the cat that he was didn’t know. There was an inward struggle — and Maurice was beaten by the cat-nature. Later he was beaten by the cook.

  Then there was that very painful incident with the butcher’s dog, the flight across gardens, the safety of the plum tree gained only just in time.

  And, worst of all, despair took hold of him, for he saw that nothing he could do would make any one say those simple words that would release him. He had hoped that Mabel might at last be made to understand, but the ink had failed him; she did not understand his subdued mewings, and when he got the cardboard letters and made the same sentence with them Mabel only thought it was that naughty boy who came through locked windows. Somehow he could not spell before any one — his nerves were not what they had been. His brain now gave him no new ideas. He felt that he was really growing like a cat in his mind. His interest in his meals grew beyond even what it had been when they were a schoolboy’s meals. He hunted mice with growing enthusiasm, though the loss of his whiskers to measure narrow places with made hunting difficult.

  He grew expert in bird-stalking, and often got quite near to a bird before it flew away, laughing at him. But all the time, in his heart, he was very, very miserable. And so the week went by.

  Maurice in his cat shape dreaded more and more the time when Lord Hugh in the boy shape should come back from Dr. Strongitharm’s. He knew — who better? — exactly the kind of things boys do to cats, and he trembled to the end of his handsome half-Persian tail.

  And then the boy came home from Dr. Strongitharm’s, and at the first sound of his boots in the hall Maurice in the cat’s body fled with silent haste to hide in the boot-cupboard.

  Here, ten minutes later, the boy that had come back from Dr. Strongitharm’s found him.

  Maurice fluffed up his tail and unsheathed his claws. Whatever this boy was going to do to him Maurice meant to resist, and his resistance should hurt the boy as much as possible. I am sorry to say Maurice swore softly among the boots, but cat-swearing is not really wrong.

  ‘Come out, you old duffer,’ said Lord Hugh in the boy shape of Maurice. ‘I’m not going to hurt you.’

  ‘I’ll see to that,’ said Maurice, backing into the corner, all teeth and claws.

  ‘Oh, I’ve had such a time!’ said Lord Hugh. ‘It’s no use, you know, old chap; I can see where you are by your green eyes. My word, they do shine. I’ve been caned and shut up in a dark room and given thousands of lines to write out.’

  ‘I’ve been beaten, too, if you come to that,’ mewed Maurice. ‘Besides the butcher’s dog.’

  It was an intense relief to speak to some one who could understand his mews.

  ‘Well, I suppose it’s Pax for the future,’ said Lord Hugh; ‘if you won’t come out, you won’t. Please leave off being a cat and be Maurice again.’

  And instantly Maurice, amid a heap of goloshes and old tennis bats, felt with a swelling heart that he was no longer a cat. No more of those undignified four legs, those tiresome pointed ears, so difficult to wash, that furry coat, that contemptible tail, and that terrible inability to express all one’s feelings in two words—’mew’ and ‘purr.’

  He scrambled out of the cupboard, and the boots and goloshes fell off him like spray off a bather.

  He stood upright in those very chequered knickerbockers that were so terrible when their knees held one vice-like, while things were tied to one’s tail. He was face to face with another boy, exactly like himself.

  ‘You haven’t changed, then — but there can’t be two Maurices.’

  ‘There sha’n’t be; not if I know it,’ said the other boy; ‘a boy’s life’s a dog’s life. Quick, before any one comes.’

  ‘Quick what?’ asked Maurice.

  ‘Why tell me to leave off being a boy, and to be Lord Hugh Cecil again.’

  Maurice told him at once. And at once the boy was gone, and there was Lord Hugh in his own shape, purring politely, yet with a watchful eye on Maurice’s movements.

  ‘Oh, you needn’t be afraid, old chap. It’s Pax right enough,’ Maurice murmured in the ear of Lord Hugh. And Lord Hugh, arching his back under Maurice’s stroking hand, replied with a purrrr-meaow that spoke volumes.

  ‘Oh, Maurice, here you are. It is nice of you to be nice to Lord Hugh, when it was because of him you — —’

  ‘He’s a good old chap,’ said Maurice, carelessly. ‘And you’re not half a bad old girl. See?’

  Mabel almost wept for joy at this magnificent compliment, and Lord Hugh himself took on a more happy and confident air.

  Please dismiss any fears which you may entertain that after this Maurice became a model boy. He didn’t. But he was much nicer than before. The conversation which he overheard when he was a cat makes him more patient with his father and mother. And he is almost always nice to Mabel, for he cannot forget all that she was to him when he wore the shape of Lord Hugh. His father attributes all the improvement in his son’s character to that week at Dr. Strongitharm’s — which, as you know, Maurice never had. Lord Hugh’s character is unchanged. Cats learn slowly and with difficulty.

  Only Maurice and Lord Hugh know the truth — Maurice has never told it to any one except me, and Lord Hugh is a very reserved cat. He never at any time had that free flow of mew which distinguished and endangered the cat-hood of Maurice.

  THE MIXED MINE

  The ship was first sighted off Dungeness. She was labouring heavily. Her paint was peculiar and her rig outlandish. She looked like a golden ship out of a painted picture.

  ‘Blessed if I ever see such a rig — nor such lines neither,’ old Hawkhurst said.

  It was a late afternoon, wild and grey. Slate-coloured clouds drove across the sky like flocks of hurried camels. The waves were purple and blue, and in the west a streak of unnatural-looking green light was all that stood for the splendours of sunset.

  ‘She do be a rum ‘un,’ said young Benenden, who had strolled along the beach with the glasses the gentleman gave him for saving the little boy from drowning. ‘Don’t know as I ever see another just like her.’

  ‘I’d give half a dollar to any chap as can tell me where she hails from — and what port it is where they has ships o’ that cut,’ said middle-aged Haversham to the group that had now gathered.

  ‘George!’ exclaimed young Benenden from under his field-glasses, ‘she’s going.’ And she went. Her bow went down suddenly and she stood stern up in the water — like a duck after rain. Then quite slowly, with no unseemly hurry, but with no moment’s change of what seemed to be her fixed purpose, the ship sank and the grey rolling waves wiped out the place where she had been.

  Now I hope you will not expect me to tell you anything more about this ship — because there is nothing more to tell. What country she came from, what port she was bound for, what cargo she carried, and what kind of tongue her crew spoke — all these things are dead secrets. And a dead secret is a secret that nobody knows. No other secrets are dead secrets. Even I do not know this one, or I would tell you at once. For I, at leas
t, have no secrets from you.

  When ships go down off Dungeness, things from them have a way of being washed up on the sands of that bay which curves from Dungeness to Folkestone, where the sea has bitten a piece out of the land — just such a half-moon-shaped piece as you bite out of a slice of bread-and-butter. Bits of wood tangled with ropes — broken furniture — ships’ biscuits in barrels and kegs that have held brandy — seamen’s chests — and sometimes sadder things that we will not talk about just now.

  Now, if you live by the sea and are grown-up you know that if you find anything on the seashore (I don’t mean starfish or razor-shells or jellyfish and sea-mice, but anything out of a ship that you would really like to keep) your duty is to take it up to the coast-guard and say, ‘Please, I’ve found this.’ Then the coast-guard will send it to the proper authority, and one of these days you’ll get a reward of one-third of the value of whatever it was that you picked up. But two-thirds of the value of anything, or even three-thirds of its value, is not at all the same thing as the thing itself — if it happened to be the kind of thing you want. But if you are not grown-up and do not live by the sea, but in a nice little villa in a nice little suburb, where all the furniture is new and the servants wear white aprons and white caps with long strings in the afternoon, then you won’t know anything about your duty, and if you find anything by the sea you’ll think that findings are keepings.