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The Wouldbegoods: Being the Further Adventures of the Treasure Seekers

by E. Nesbit · English · Gutenberg #794 · 435,329 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Wouldbegoods: Being the Further Adventures of the Treasure Seekers

Author: E. Nesbit


        
Release date: January 1, 1997 [eBook #794]
                Most recently updated: January 7, 2018

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/794

Credits: Produced by Jo Churcher, and David Widger


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE WOULDBEGOODS: BEING THE FURTHER ADVENTURES OF THE TREASURE SEEKERS ***




Produced by Jo Churcher





THE WOULDBEGOODS

BEING THE FURTHER ADVENTURES OF THE TREASURE SEEKERS

By E. Nesbit



                                TO
                                My Dear Son
                                Fabian Bland


CONTENTS

     1.  The Jungle
     2.  The Wouldbegoods
     3.  Bill’s Tombstone
     4.  The Tower of Mystery
     5.  The Waterworks
     6.  The Circus
     7.  Being Beavers; or, The Young Explorers (Arctic or Otherwise)
     8.  The High-Born Babe
     9.  Hunting the Fox
     10.  The Sale of Antiquities
     11.  The Benevolent Bar
     12.  The Canterbury Pilgrims
     13.  The Dragon’s Teeth; or, Army Seed
     14.  Albert’s Uncle’s Grandmother; or, The Long-Lost




CHAPTER 1. THE JUNGLE



Children are like jam: all very well in the proper place, but you can’t
stand them all over the shop--eh, what?’

These were the dreadful words of our Indian uncle. They made us feel
very young and angry; and yet we could not be comforted by calling him
names to ourselves, as you do when nasty grown-ups say nasty things,
because he is not nasty, but quite the exact opposite when not
irritated. And we could not think it ungentlemanly of him to say we were
like jam, because, as Alice says, jam is very nice indeed--only not on
furniture and improper places like that. My father said, ‘Perhaps they
had better go to boarding-school.’ And that was awful, because we know
Father disapproves of boarding-schools. And he looked at us and said, ‘I
am ashamed of them, sir!’

Your lot is indeed a dark and terrible one when your father is ashamed
of you. And we all knew this, so that we felt in our chests just as if
we had swallowed a hard-boiled egg whole. At least, this is what
Oswald felt, and Father said once that Oswald, as the eldest, was the
representative of the family, so, of course, the others felt the same.

And then everybody said nothing for a short time. At last Father said--

‘You may go--but remember--’

The words that followed I am not going to tell you. It is no use telling
you what you know before--as they do in schools. And you must all have
had such words said to you many times. We went away when it was over.
The girls cried, and we boys got out books and began to read, so that
nobody should think we cared. But we felt it deeply in our interior
hearts, especially Oswald, who is the eldest and the representative of
the family.

We felt it all the more because we had not really meant to do anything
wrong. We only thought perhaps the grown-ups would not be quite pleased
if they knew, and that is quite different. Besides, we meant to put all
the things back in their proper places when we had done with them before
anyone found out about it. But I must not anticipate (that means telling
the end of the story before the beginning. I tell you this because it is
so sickening to have words you don’t know in a story, and to be told to
look it up in the dicker).

We are the Bastables--Oswald, Dora, Dicky, Alice, Noel, and H. O. If you
want to know why we call our youngest brother H. O. you can jolly well
read The Treasure Seekers and find out. We were the Treasure Seekers,
and we sought it high and low, and quite regularly, because we
particularly wanted to find it. And at last we did not find it, but
we were found by a good, kind Indian uncle, who helped Father with his
business, so that Father was able to take us all to live in a jolly big
red house on Blackheath, instead of in the Lewisham Road, where we lived
when we were only poor but honest Treasure Seekers. When we were poor
but honest we always used to think that if only Father had plenty of
business, and we did not have to go short of pocket money and wear
shabby clothes (I don’t mind this myself, but the girls do), we should
be happy and very, very good.

And when we were taken to the beautiful big Blackheath house we
thought now all would be well, because it was a house with vineries and
pineries, and gas and water, and shrubberies and stabling, and replete
with every modern convenience, like it says in Dyer & Hilton’s list
of Eligible House Property. I read all about it, and I have copied the
words quite right.

It is a beautiful house, all the furniture solid and strong, no casters
off the chairs, and the tables not scratched, and the silver not dented;
and lots of servants, and the most decent meals every day--and lots of
pocket-money.

But it is wonderful how soon you get used to things, even the things you
want most. Our watches, for instance. We wanted them frightfully; but
when I had mine a week or two, after the mainspring got broken and was
repaired at Bennett’s in the village, I hardly cared to look at the
works at all, and it did not make me feel happy in my heart any more,
though, of course, I should have been very unhappy if it had been taken
away from me. And the same with new clothes and nice dinners and having
enough of everything. You soon get used to it all, and it does not make
you extra happy, although, if you had it all taken away, you would be
very dejected. (That is a good word, and one I have never used before.)
You get used to everything, as I said, and then you want something more.
Father says this is what people mean by the deceitfulness of riches; but
Albert’s uncle says it is the spirit of progress, and Mrs Leslie said
some people called it ‘divine discontent’. Oswald asked them all what
they thought one Sunday at dinner. Uncle said it was rot, and what we
wanted was bread and water and a licking; but he meant it for a joke.
This was in the Easter holidays.

We went to live at the Red House at Christmas. After the holidays the
girls went to the Blackheath High School, and we boys went to the Prop.
(that means the Proprietary School). And we had to swot rather during
term; but about Easter we knew the deceitfulness of riches in the vac.,
when there was nothing much on, like pantomimes and things. Then there
was the summer term, and we swotted more than ever; and it was boiling
hot, and masters’ tempers got short and sharp, and the girls used to
wish the exams came in cold weather. I can’t think why they don’t. But
I suppose schools don’t think of sensible thinks like that. They teach
botany at girls’ schools.

Then the Midsummer holidays came, and we breathed again--but only for a
few days. We began to feel as if we had forgotten something, and did not
know what it was. We wanted something to happen--only we didn’t exactly
know what. So we were very pleased when Father said--

‘I’ve asked Mr Foulkes to send his children here for a week or two. You
know--the kids who came at Christmas. You must be jolly to them, and see
that they have a good time, don’t you know.’

We remembered them right enough--they were little pinky, frightened
things, like white mice, with very bright eyes. They had not been to our
house since Christmas, because Denis, the boy, had been ill, and they
had been with an aunt at Ramsgate.

Alice and Dora would have liked to get the bedrooms ready for the
honoured guests, but a really good housemaid is sometimes more ready to
say ‘Don’t’ than even a general. So the girls had to chuck it. Jane only
let them put flowers in the pots on the visitors’ mantelpieces, and then
they had to ask the gardener which kind they might pick, because nothing
worth gathering happened to be growing in our own gardens just then.

Their train got in at 12.27. We all went to meet them. Afterwards I
thought that was a mistake, because their aunt was with them, and she
wore black with beady things and a tight bonnet, and she said, when we
took our hats off--‘Who are you?’ quite crossly.

We said, ‘We are the Bastables; we’ve come to meet Daisy and Denny.’

The aunt is a very rude lady, and it made us sorry for Daisy and Denny
when she said to them--

‘Are these the children? Do you remember them?’ We weren’t very tidy,
perhaps, because we’d been playing brigands in the shrubbery; and we
knew we should have to wash for dinner as soon as we got back, anyhow.
But still--

Denny said he thought he remembered us. But Daisy said, ‘Of course they
are,’ and then looked as if she was going to cry.

So then the aunt called a cab, and told the man where to drive, and put
Daisy and Denny in, and then she said--

‘You two little girls may go too, if you like, but you little boys must
walk.’

So the cab went off, and we were left. The aunt turned to us to say a
few last words. We knew it would have been about brushing your hair and
wearing gloves, so Oswald said, ‘Good-bye’, and turned haughtily away,
before she could begin, and so did the others. No one but that kind
of black beady tight lady would say ‘little boys’. She is like Miss
Murdstone in David Copperfield. I should like to tell her so; but she
would not understand. I don’t suppose she has ever read anything but
Markham’s History and Mangnall’s Questions--improving books like that.

When we got home we found all four of those who had ridden in the cab
sitting in our sitting-room--we don’t call it nursery now--looking very
thoroughly washed, and our girls were asking polite questions and the
others were saying ‘Yes’ and ‘No’, and ‘I don’t know’. We boys did not
say anything. We stood at the window and looked out till the gong
went for our dinner. We felt it was going to be awful--and it was. The
newcomers would never have done for knight-errants, or to carry the
Cardinal’s sealed message through the heart of France on a horse; they
would never have thought of anything to say to throw the enemy off the
scent when they got into a tight place.

They said ‘Yes, please’, and ‘No, thank you’; and they ate very neatly,
and always wiped their mouths before they drank, as well as after, and
never spoke with them full.

And after dinner it got worse and worse.

We got out all our books and they said ‘Thank you’, and didn’t look at
them properly. And we got out all our toys, and they said ‘Thank you,
it’s very nice’ to everything. And it got less and less pleasant, and
towards teatime it came to nobody saying anything except Noel and H.
O.--and they talked to each other about cricket.

After tea Father came in, and he played ‘Letters’ with them and the
girls, and it was a little better; but while late dinner was going on--I
shall never forget it. Oswald felt like the hero of a book--‘almost
at the end of his resources’. I don’t think I was ever glad of bedtime
before, but that time I was.

When they had gone to bed (Daisy had to have all her strings and buttons
undone for her, Dora told me, though she is nearly ten, and Denny said
he couldn’t sleep without the gas being left a little bit on) we held
a council in the girls’ room. We all sat on the bed--it is a mahogany
fourposter with green curtains very good for tents, only the housekeeper
doesn’t allow it, and Oswald said--

‘This is jolly nice, isn’t it?’

‘They’ll be better to-morrow,’ Alice said, ‘they’re only shy.’

Dicky said shy was all very well, but you needn’t behave like a perfect
idiot.

‘They’re frightened. You see we’re all strange to them,’ Dora said.

‘We’re not wild beasts or Indians; we shan’t eat them. What have they
got to be frightened of?’ Dicky said this.

Noel told us he thought they were an enchanted prince and princess who’d
been turned into white rabbits, and their bodies had got changed back
but not their insides.

But Oswald told him to dry up.

‘It’s no use making things up about them,’ he said. ‘The thing is:
what are we going to DO? We can’t have our holidays spoiled by these
snivelling kids.’

‘No,’ Alice said, ‘but they can’t possibly go on snivelling for ever.
Perhaps they’ve got into the habit of it with that Murdstone aunt. She’s
enough to make anyone snivel.’

‘All the same,’ said Oswald, ‘we jolly well aren’t going to have another
day like today. We must do something to rouse them from their snivelling
leth--what’s its name?--something sudden and--what is it?--decisive.’

‘A booby trap,’ said H. O., ‘the first thing when they get up, and an
apple-pie bed at night.’

But Dora would not hear of it, and I own she was right.

‘Suppose,’ she said, ‘we could get up a good play--like we did when we
were Treasure Seekers.’

We said, well what? But she did not say.

‘It ought to be a good long thing--to last all day,’ Dicky said, ‘and if
they like they can play, and if they don’t--’

‘If they don’t, I’ll read to them,’ Alice said.

But we all said ‘No, you don’t--if you begin that way you’ll have to go
on.’

And Dicky added, ‘I wasn’t going to say that at all. I was going to say
if they didn’t like it they could jolly well do the other thing.’

We all agreed that we must think of something, but we none of us could,
and at last the council broke up in confusion because Mrs Blake--she is
the housekeeper--came up and turned off the gas.

But next morning when we were having breakfast, and the two strangers
were sitting there so pink and clean, Oswald suddenly said--

‘I know; we’ll have a jungle in the garden.’

And the others agreed, and we talked about it till brek was over. The
little strangers only said ‘I don’t know’ whenever we said anything to
them.

After brekker Oswald beckoned his brothers and sisters mysteriously
apart and said--

‘Do you agree to let me be captain today, because I thought of it?’

And they said they would.

Then he said, ‘We’ll play Jungle Book, and I shall be Mowgli. The rest
of you can be what you like--Mowgli’s father and mother, or any of the
beasts.’

‘I don’t suppose they know the book,’ said Noel. ‘They don’t look as if
they read anything, except at lesson times.’

‘Then they can go on being beasts all the time,’ Oswald said. ‘Anyone
can be a beast.’

So it was settled.

And now Oswald--Albert’s uncle has sometimes said he is clever at
arranging things--began to lay his plans for the jungle. The day was
indeed well chosen. Our Indian uncle was away; Father was away; Mrs
Blake was going away, and the housemaid had an afternoon off. Oswald’s
first conscious act was to get rid of the white mice--I mean the little
good visitors. He explained to them that there would be a play in the
afternoon, and they could be what they liked, and gave them the Jungle
Book to read the stories he told them to--all the ones about Mowgli.
He led the strangers to a secluded spot among the sea-kale pots in the
kitchen garden and left them. Then he went back to the others, and we
had a jolly morning under the cedar talking about what we would do when
Blakie was gone. She went just after our dinner.

When we asked Denny what he would like to be in the play, it turned out
he had not read the stories Oswald told him at all, but only the ‘White
Seal’ and ‘Rikki Tikki’.

We then agreed to make the jungle first and dress up for our parts
afterwards. Oswald was a little uncomfortable about leaving the
strangers alone all the morning, so he said Denny should be his
aide-de-camp, and he was really quite useful. He is rather handy with
his fingers, and things that he does up do not come untied. Daisy might
have come too, but she wanted to go on reading, so we let her, which is
the truest manners to a visitor. Of course the shrubbery was to be the
jungle, and the lawn under the cedar a forest glade, and then we began
to collect the things. The cedar lawn is just nicely out of the way of
the windows. It was a jolly hot day--the kind of day when the sunshine
is white and the shadows are dark grey, not black like they are in the
evening.

We all thought of different things. Of course first we dressed up
pillows in the skins of beasts and set them about on the grass to look
as natural as we could. And then we got Pincher, and rubbed him all
over with powdered slate-pencil, to make him the right colour for Grey
Brother. But he shook it all off, and it had taken an awful time to do.
Then Alice said--

‘Oh, I know!’ and she ran off to Father’s dressing-room, and came back
with the tube of creme d’amande pour la barbe et les mains, and we
squeezed it on Pincher and rubbed it in, and then the slate-pencil stuff
stuck all right, and he rolled in the dust-bin of his own accord, which
made him just the right colour. He is a very clever dog, but soon after
he went off and we did not find him till quite late in the afternoon.
Denny helped with Pincher, and with the wild-beast skins, and when
Pincher was finished he said--

‘Please, may I make some paper birds to put in the trees? I know how.’

And of course we said ‘Yes’, and he only had red ink and newspapers, and
quickly he made quite a lot of large paper birds with red tails. They
didn’t look half bad on the edge of the shrubbery.

While he was doing this he suddenly said, or rather screamed, ‘Oh?’

And we looked, and it was a creature with great horns and a fur
rug--something like a bull and something like a minotaur--and I don’t
wonder Denny was frightened. It was Alice, and it was first-class.

Up to now all was not yet lost beyond recall. It was the stuffed fox
that did the mischief--and I am sorry to own it was Oswald who thought
of it. He is not ashamed of having THOUGHT of it. That was rather clever
of him. But he knows now that it is better not to take other people’s
foxes and things without asking, even if you live in the same house with
them.

It was Oswald who undid the back of the glass case in the hall and got
out the fox with the green and grey duck in its mouth, and when the
others saw how awfully like life they looked on the lawn, they all
rushed off to fetch the other stuffed things. Uncle has a tremendous
lot of stuffed things. He shot most of them himself--but not the fox, of
course. There was another fox’s mask, too, and we hung that in a bush to
look as if the fox was peeping out. And the stuffed birds we fastened on
to the trees with string. The duck-bill--what’s its name?--looked very
well sitting on his tail with the otter snarling at him. Then Dicky had
an idea; and though not nearly so much was said about it afterwards as
there was about the stuffed things, I think myself it was just as bad,
though it was a good idea, too. He just got the hose and put the end
over a branch of the cedar-tree. Then we got the steps they clean
windows with, and let the hose rest on the top of the steps and run. It
was to be a waterfall, but it ran between the steps and was only wet and
messy; so we got Father’s mackintosh and uncle’s and covered the steps
with them, so that the water ran down all right and was glorious, and it
ran away in a stream across the grass where we had dug a little channel
for it--and the otter and the duck-bill-thing were as if in their native
haunts. I hope all this is not very dull to read about. I know it was
jolly good fun to do. Taking one thing with another, I don’t know that
we ever had a better time while it lasted.

We got all the rabbits out of the hutches and put pink paper tails on
to them, and hunted them with horns made out of The Times. They got away
somehow, and before they were caught next day they had eaten a good
many lettuces and other things. Oswald is very sorry for this. He rather
likes the gardener.

Denny wanted to put paper tails on the guinea-pigs, and it was no use
our telling him there was nothing to tie the paper on to. He thought we
were kidding until we showed him, and then he said, ‘Well, never mind’,
and got the girls to give him bits of the blue stuff left over from
their dressing-gowns.

‘I’ll make them sashes to tie round their little middles,’ he said. And
he did, and the bows stuck up on the tops of their backs. One of the
guinea-pigs was never seen again, and the same with the tortoise when we
had done his shell with vermilion paint. He crawled away and returned no
more. Perhaps someone collected him and thought he was an expensive kind
unknown in these cold latitudes.

The lawn under the cedar was transformed into a dream of beauty,
what with the stuffed creatures and the paper-tailed things and the
waterfall. And Alice said--

‘I wish the tigers did not look so flat.’ For of course with pillows you
can only pretend it is a sleeping tiger getting ready to make a spring
out at you. It is difficult to prop up tiger-skins in a life-like manner
when there are no bones inside them, only pillows and sofa cushions.

‘What about the beer-stands?’ I said. And we got two out of the cellar.
With bolsters and string we fastened insides to the tigers--and they
were really fine. The legs of the beer-stands did for tigers’ legs. It
was indeed the finishing touch.

Then we boys put on just our bathing drawers and vests--so as to be able
to play with the waterfall without hurting our clothes. I think this was
thoughtful. The girls only tucked up their frocks and took their shoes
and stockings off. H. O. painted his legs and his hands with Condy’s
fluid--to make him brown, so that he might be Mowgli, although Oswald
was captain and had plainly said he was going to be Mowgli himself. Of
course the others weren’t going to stand that. So Oswald said--

‘Very well. Nobody asked you to brown yourself like that. But now you’ve
done it, you’ve simply got to go and be a beaver, and live in the dam
under the waterfall till it washes off.’

He said he didn’t want to be beavers. And Noel said--

‘Don’t make him. Let him be the bronze statue in the palace gardens that
the fountain plays out of.’

So we let him have the hose and hold it up over his head. It made a
lovely fountain, only he remained brown. So then Dicky and Oswald and
I did ourselves brown too, and dried H. O. as well as we could with our
handkerchiefs, because he was just beginning to snivel. The brown did
not come off any of us for days.

Oswald was to be Mowgli, and we were just beginning to arrange the
different parts. The rest of the hose that was on the ground was Kaa,
the Rock Python, and Pincher was Grey Brother, only we couldn’t find
him. And while most of us were talking, Dicky and Noel got messing about
with the beer-stand tigers.

And then a really sad event instantly occurred, which was not really our
fault, and we did not mean to.

That Daisy girl had been mooning indoors all the afternoon with the
Jungle Books, and now she came suddenly out, just as Dicky and Noel had
got under the tigers and were shoving them along to fright each other.
Of course, this is not in the Mowgli book at all: but they did look
jolly like real tigers, and I am very far from wishing to blame the
girl, though she little knew what would be the awful consequence of her
rash act. But for her we might have got out of it all much better than
we did. What happened was truly horrid.

As soon as Daisy saw the tigers she stopped short, and uttering a shriek
like a railway whistle she fell flat on the ground.

‘Fear not, gentle Indian maid,’ Oswald cried, thinking with surprise
that perhaps after all she did know how to play, ‘I myself will protect
thee.’ And he sprang forward with the native bow and arrows out of
uncle’s study.

The gentle Indian maiden did not move.

‘Come hither,’ Dora said, ‘let us take refuge in yonder covert while
this good knight does battle for us.’ Dora might have remembered that we
were savages, but she did not. And that is Dora all over. And still the
Daisy girl did not move.

Then we were truly frightened. Dora and Alice lifted her up, and her
mouth was a horrid violet-colour and her eyes half shut. She looked
horrid. Not at all like fair fainting damsels, who are always of an
interesting pallor. She was green, like a cheap oyster on a stall.

We did what we could, a prey to alarm as we were. We rubbed her hands
and let the hose play gently but perseveringly on her unconscious brow.
The girls loosened her dress, though it was only the kind that comes
down straight without a waist. And we were all doing what we could as
hard as we could, when we heard the click of the front gate. There was
no mistake about it.

‘I hope whoever it is will go straight to the front door,’ said Alice.
But whoever it was did not. There were feet on the gravel, and there was
the uncle’s voice, saying in his hearty manner--

‘This way. This way. On such a day as this we shall find our young
barbarians all at play somewhere about the grounds.’

And then, without further warning, the uncle, three other gentlemen and
two ladies burst upon the scene.

We had no clothes on to speak of--I mean us boys. We were all wet
through. Daisy was in a faint or a fit, or dead, none of us then knew
which. And all the stuffed animals were there staring the uncle in the
face. Most of them had got a sprinkling, and the otter and the duck-bill
brute were simply soaked. And three of us were dark brown. Concealment,
as so often happens, was impossible.

The quick brain of Oswald saw, in a flash, exactly how it would strike
the uncle, and his brave young blood ran cold in his veins. His heart
stood still.

‘What’s all this--eh, what?’ said the tones of the wronged uncle.

Oswald spoke up and said it was jungles we were playing, and he didn’t
know what was up with Daisy. He explained as well as anyone could, but
words were now in vain.

The uncle had a Malacca cane in his hand, and we were but ill prepared
to meet the sudden attack. Oswald and H. O. caught it worst. The other
boys were under the tigers--and of course my uncle would not strike a
girl. Denny was a visitor and so got off.

But it was bread and water for us for the next three days, and our own
rooms. I will not tell you how we sought to vary the monotonousness of
imprisonment. Oswald thought of taming a mouse, but he could not find
one. The reason of the wretched captives might have given way but for
the gutter that you can crawl along from our room to the girls’. But
I will not dwell on this because you might try it yourselves, and it
really is dangerous. When my father came home we got the talking to,
and we said we were sorry--and we really were--especially about Daisy,
though she had behaved with muffishness, and then it was settled that
we were to go into the country and stay till we had grown into better
children.

Albert’s uncle was writing a book in the country; we were to go to his
house. We were glad of this--Daisy and Denny too. This we bore nobly. We
knew we had deserved it. We were all very sorry for everything, and we
resolved that for the future we WOULD be good.

I am not sure whether we kept this resolution or not. Oswald thinks now
that perhaps we made a mistake in trying so very hard to be good all at
once. You should do everything by degrees.

P.S.--It turned out Daisy was not really dead at all. It was only
fainting--so like a girl.


N.B.--Pincher was found on the drawing-room sofa.


Appendix.--I have not told you half the things we did for the
jungle--for instance, about the elephants’ tusks and the horse-hair
sofa-cushions, and uncle’s fishing-boots.



CHAPTER 2. THE WOULDBEGOODS

When we were sent down into the country to learn to be good we felt
it was rather good business, because we knew our being sent there was
really only to get us out of the way for a little while, and we knew
right enough that it wasn’t a punishment, though Mrs Blake said it was,
because we had been punished thoroughly for taking the stuffed animals
out and making a jungle on the lawn with them, and the garden hose. And
you cannot be punished twice for the same offence. This is the English
law; at least I think so. And at any rate no one would punish you three
times, and we had had the Malacca cane and the solitary confinement; and
the uncle had kindly explained to us that all ill-feeling between him
and us was wiped out entirely by the bread and water we had endured. And
what with the bread and water and being prisoners, and not being able
to tame any mice in our prisons, I quite feel that we had suffered it up
thoroughly, and now we could start fair.

I think myself that descriptions of places are generally dull, but I
have sometimes thought that was because the authors do not tell you what
you truly want to know. However, dull or not, here goes--because you
won’t understand anything unless I tell you what the place was like.

The Moat House was the one we went to stay at. There has been a house
there since Saxon times. It is a manor, and a manor goes on having a
house on it whatever happens. The Moat House was burnt down once or
twice in ancient centuries--I don’t remember which--but they always
built a new one, and Cromwell’s soldiers smashed it about, but it was
patched up again. It is a very odd house: the front door opens straight
into the dining-room, and there are red curtains and a black-and-white
marble floor like a chess-board, and there is a secret staircase, only
it is not secret now--only rather rickety. It is not very big, but there
is a watery moat all round it with a brick bridge that leads to the
front door. Then, on the other side of the moat there is the farm, with
barns and oast houses and stables, or things like that. And the other
way the garden lawn goes on till it comes to the churchyard. The
churchyard is not divided from the garden at all except by a little
grass bank. In the front of the house there is more garden, and the big
fruit garden is at the back.

The man the house belongs to likes new houses, so he built a big one
with conservatories and a stable with a clock in a turret on the top,
and he left the Moat House. And Albert’s uncle took it, and my father
was to come down sometimes from Saturday to Monday, and Albert’s uncle
was to live with us all the time, and he would be writing a book, and we
were not to bother him, but he would give an eye to us. I hope all this
is plain. I have said it as short as I can.

We got down rather late, but there was still light enough to see the
big bell hanging at the top of the house. The rope belonging to it went
right down the house, through our bedroom to the dining-room. H. O. saw
the rope and pulled it while he was washing his hands for supper, and
Dicky and I let him, and the bell tolled solemnly. Father shouted to him
not to, and we went down to supper.

But presently there were many feet trampling on the gravel, and Father
went out to see. When he came back he said--‘The whole village, or half
of it, has come up to see why the bell rang. It’s only rung for fire or
burglars. Why can’t you kids let things alone?’

Albert’s uncle said--

‘Bed follows supper as the fruit follows the flower. They’ll do no more
mischief to-night, sir. To-morrow I will point out a few of the things
to be avoided in this bucolic retreat.’

So it was bed directly after supper, and that was why we did not see
much that night.

But in the morning we were all up rather early, and we seemed to have
awakened in a new world rich in surprises beyond the dreams of anybody,
as it says in the quotation.

We went everywhere we could in the time, but when it was breakfast-time
we felt we had not seen half or a quarter. The room we had breakfast
in was exactly like in a story--black oak panels and china in corner
cupboards with glass doors. These doors were locked. There were green
curtains, and honeycomb for breakfast. After brekker my father went back
to town, and Albert’s uncle went too, to see publishers. We saw them to
the station, and Father gave us a long list of what we weren’t to do. It
began with ‘Don’t pull ropes unless you’re quite sure what will happen
at the other end,’ and it finished with ‘For goodness sake, try to keep
out of mischief till I come down on Saturday’. There were lots of other
things in between.

We all promised we would. And we saw them off and waved till the train
was quite out of sight. Then we started to walk home. Daisy was tired so
Oswald carried her home on his back. When we got home she said--

‘I do like you, Oswald.’

She is not a bad little kid; and Oswald felt it was his duty to be nice
to her because she was a visitor. Then we looked all over everything.
It was a glorious place. You did not know where to begin. We were all
a little tired before we found the hayloft, but we pulled ourselves
together to make a fort with the trusses of hay--great square
things--and we were having a jolly good time, all of us, when suddenly a
trap-door opened and a head bobbed up with a straw in its mouth. We knew
nothing about the country then, and the head really did scare us rather,
though, of course, we found out directly that the feet belonging to it
were standing on the bar of the loose-box underneath. The head said--

‘Don’t you let the governor catch you a-spoiling of that there hay,
that’s all.’ And it spoke thickly because of the straw.

It is strange to think how ignorant you were in the past. We can hardly
believe now that once we really did not know that it spoiled hay to mess
about with it. Horses don’t like to eat it afterwards.

Always remember this.

When the head had explained a little more it went away, and we turned
the handle of the chaff-cutting machine, and nobody got hurt, though the
head HAD said we should cut our fingers off if we touched it.

And then we sat down on the floor, which is dirty with the nice clean
dirt that is more than half chopped hay, and those there was room for
hung their legs down out of the top door, and we looked down at the
farmyard, which is very slushy when you get down into it, but most
interesting.

Then Alice said--

‘Now we’re all here, and the boys are tired enough to sit still for a
minute, I want to have a council.’

We said what about? And she said, ‘I’ll tell you.’ H. O., don’t wriggle
so; sit on my frock if the straws tickle your legs.’

You see he wears socks, and so he can never be quite as comfortable as
anyone else.

‘Promise not to laugh’ Alice said, getting very red, and looking at
Dora, who got red too.

We did, and then she said:

‘Dora and I have talked this over, and Daisy too, and we have written it
down because it is easier than saying it. Shall I read it? or will you,
Dora?’

Dora said it didn’t matter; Alice might. So Alice read it, and though
she gabbled a bit we all heard it. I copied it afterwards. This is what
she read:


     NEW SOCIETY FOR BEING GOOD IN

‘I, Dora Bastable, and Alice Bastable, my sister, being of sound mind
and body, when we were shut up with bread and water on that jungle day,
we thought a great deal about our naughty sins, and we made our minds up
to be good for ever after. And we talked to Daisy about it, and she had
an idea. So we want to start a society for being good in. It is Daisy’s
idea, but we think so too.’

‘You know,’ Dora interrupted, ‘when people want to do good things they
always make a society. There are thousands--there’s the Missionary
Society.’

‘Yes,’ Alice said, ‘and the Society for the Prevention of something or
other, and the Young Men’s Mutual Improvement Society, and the S.P.G.’

‘What’s S.P.G.?’ Oswald asked.

‘Society for the Propagation of the Jews, of course,’ said Noel, who
cannot always spell.

‘No, it isn’t; but do let me go on.’

Alice did go on.

‘We propose to get up a society, with a chairman and a treasurer and
secretary, and keep a journal-book saying what we’ve done. If that
doesn’t make us good it won’t be my fault.

‘The aim of the society is nobleness and goodness, and great and
unselfish deeds. We wish not to be such a nuisance to grown-up people
and to perform prodigies of real goodness. We wish to spread our
wings’--here Alice read very fast. She told me afterwards Daisy had
helped her with that part, and she thought when she came to the wings
they sounded rather silly--‘to spread our wings and rise above the kind
of interesting things that you ought not to do, but to do kindnesses to
all, however low and mean.’


Denny was listening carefully. Now he nodded three or four times.

     ‘Little words of kindness’ (he said),
     ‘Little deeds of love,
     Make this earth an eagle
     Like the one above.’

This did not sound right, but we let it pass, because an eagle does have
wings, and we wanted to hear the rest of what the girls had written. But
there was no rest.

‘That’s all,’ said Alice, and Daisy said--‘Don’t you think it’s a good
idea?’

‘That depends,’ Oswald answered, ‘who is president and what you mean by
being good.’

Oswald did not care very much for the idea himself, because being
good is not the sort of thing he thinks it is proper to talk about,
especially before strangers. But the girls and Denny seemed to like
it, so Oswald did not say exactly what he thought, especially as it was
Daisy’s idea. This was true politeness.

‘I think it would be nice,’ Noel said, ‘if we made it a sort of play.
Let’s do the Pilgrim’s Progress.’

We talked about that for some time, but it did not come to anything,
because we all wanted to be Mr Greatheart, except H. O., who wanted to
be the lions, and you could not have lions in a Society for Goodness.

Dicky said he did not wish to play if it meant reading books about
children who die; he really felt just as Oswald did about it, he told me
afterwards. But the girls were looking as if they were in Sunday school,
and we did not wish to be unkind.

At last Oswald said, ‘Well, let’s draw up the rules of the society, and
choose the president and settle the name.’

Dora said Oswald should be president, and he modestly consented. She was
secretary, and Denny treasurer if we ever had any money.

Making the rules took us all the afternoon. They were these:


               RULES

1. Every member is to be as good as possible.

2. There is to be no more jaw than necessary about being good.
(Oswald and Dicky put that rule in.)

3. No day must pass without our doing some kind action to a suffering
fellow-creature.

4. We are to meet every day, or as often as we like.

5. We are to do good to people we don’t like as often as we can.

6. No one is to leave the Society without the consent of all the
rest of us.

7. The Society is to be kept a profound secret from all the world
except us.

8. The name of our Society is--

And when we got as far as that we all began to talk at once. Dora wanted
it called the Society for Humane Improvement; Denny said the Society for
Reformed Outcast Children; but Dicky said, No, we really were not so bad
as all that.

Then H. O. said, ‘Call it the Good Society.’

‘Or the Society for Being Good In,’ said Daisy.

‘Or the Society of Goods,’ said Noel.

‘That’s priggish,’ said Oswald; ‘besides, we don’t know whether we shall
be so very.’

‘You see,’ Alice explained, ‘we only said if we COULD we would be good.’

‘Well, then,’ Dicky said, getting up and beginning to dust the chopped
hay off himself, ‘call it the Society of the Wouldbegoods and have done
with it.’

Oswald thinks Dicky was getting sick of it and wanted to make himself
a little disagreeable. If so, he was doomed to disappointment. For
everyone else clapped hands and called out, ‘That’s the very thing!’
Then the girls went off to write out the rules, and took H. O. with
them, and Noel went to write some poetry to put in the minute book.
That’s what you call the book that a society’s secretary writes what it
does in. Denny went with him to help. He knows a lot of poetry. I think
he went to a lady’s school where they taught nothing but that. He was
rather shy of us, but he took to Noel. I can’t think why. Dicky and
Oswald walked round the garden and told each other what they thought of
the new society.

‘I’m not sure we oughtn’t to have put our foot down at the beginning,’
Dicky said. ‘I don’t see much in it, anyhow.’

‘It pleases the girls,’ Oswald said, for he is a kind brother.

‘But we’re not going to stand jaw, and “words in season”, and “loving
sisterly warnings”. I tell you what it is, Oswald, we’ll have to run
this thing our way, or it’ll be jolly beastly for everybody.’

Oswald saw this plainly.

‘We must do something,’ Dicky said; ‘it’s very very hard, though. Still,
there must be SOME interesting things that are not wrong.’

‘I suppose so,’ Oswald said, ‘but being good is so much like being a
muff, generally. Anyhow I’m not going to smooth the pillows of the sick,
or read to the aged poor, or any rot out of Ministering Children.’

‘No more am I,’ Dicky said. He was chewing a straw like the head had
in its mouth, ‘but I suppose we must play the game fair. Let’s begin by
looking out for something useful to do--something like mending things or
cleaning them, not just showing off.’

‘The boys in books chop kindling wood and save their pennies to buy tea
and tracts.’

‘Little beasts!’ said Dick. ‘I say, let’s talk about something
else.’ And Oswald was glad to, for he was beginning to feel jolly
uncomfortable.

We were all rather quiet at tea, and afterwards Oswald played draughts
with Daisy and the others yawned. I don’t know when we’ve had such a
gloomy evening. And everyone was horribly polite, and said ‘Please’ and
‘Thank you’ far more than requisite.

Albert’s uncle came home after tea. He was jolly, and told us stories,
but he noticed us being a little dull, and asked what blight had fallen
on our young lives. Oswald could have answered and said, ‘It is the
Society of the Wouldbegoods that is the blight,’ but of course he didn’t
and Albert’s uncle said no more, but he went up and kissed the girls
when they were in bed, and asked them if there was anything wrong. And
they told him no, on their honour.

The next morning Oswald awoke early. The refreshing beams of the morning
sun shone on his narrow white bed and on the sleeping forms of his dear
little brothers and Denny, who had got the pillow on top of his head and
was snoring like a kettle when it sings. Oswald could not remember
at first what was the matter with him, and then he remembered the
Wouldbegoods, and wished he hadn’t. He felt at first as if there was
nothing you could do, and even hesitated to buzz a pillow at Denny’s
head. But he soon saw that this could not be. So he chucked his boot and
caught Denny right in the waistcoat part, and thus the day began more
brightly than he had expected.

Oswald had not done anything out of the way good the night before,
except that when no one was looking he polished the brass candlestick in
the girls’ bedroom with one of his socks. And he might just as well have
let it alone, for the servants cleaned it again with the other things in
the morning, and he could never find the sock afterwards. There were two
servants. One of them had to be called Mrs Pettigrew instead of Jane and
Eliza like others. She was cook and managed things.

After breakfast Albert’s uncle said--

‘I now seek the retirement of my study. At your peril violate my
privacy before 1.30 sharp. Nothing short of bloodshed will warrant the
intrusion, and nothing short of man--or rather boy--slaughter shall
avenge it.’

So we knew he wanted to be quiet, and the girls decided that we ought to
play out of doors so as not to disturb him; we should have played out of
doors anyhow on a jolly fine day like that.

But as we were going out Dicky said to Oswald--

‘I say, come along here a minute, will you?’

So Oswald came along, and Dicky took him into the other parlour and shut
the door, and Oswald said--

‘Well, spit it out: what is it?’ He knows that is vulgar, and he would
not have said it to anyone but his own brother. Dicky said--

‘It’s a pretty fair nuisance. I told you how it would be.’ And Oswald
was patient with him, and said--

‘What is? Don’t be all day about it.’

Dicky fidgeted about a bit, and then he said--

‘Well, I did as I said. I looked about for something useful to do. And
you know that dairy window that wouldn’t open--only a little bit like
that? Well, I mended the catch with wire and whip cord and it opened
wide.’

‘And I suppose they didn’t want it mended,’ said Oswald. He knew but too
well that grown-up people sometimes like to keep things far different
from what we would, and you catch it if you try to do otherwise.

‘I shouldn’t have minded THAT,’ Dicky said, ‘because I could easily have
taken it all off again if they’d only said so. But the sillies went and
propped up a milk-pan against the window. They never took the trouble to
notice I had mended it. So the wretched thing pushed the window open all
by itself directly they propped it up, and it tumbled through into the
moat, and they are most awfully waxy. All the men are out in the fields
and they haven’t any spare milk-pans. If I were a farmer, I must say
I wouldn’t stick at an extra milk-pan or two. Accidents must happen
sometimes. I call it mean.’

Dicky spoke in savage tones. But Oswald was not so unhappy, first
because it wasn’t his fault, and next because he is a far-seeing boy.

‘Never mind,’ he said kindly. ‘Keep your tail up. We’ll get the beastly
milk-pan out all right. Come on.’ He rushed hastily to the garden and
gave a low, signifying whistle, which the others know well enough to
mean something extra being up.

And when they were all gathered round him he spoke.

‘Fellow countrymen,’ he said, ‘we’re going to have a rousing good time.’

‘It’s nothing naughty, is it,’ Daisy asked, ‘like the last time you had
that was rousingly good?’

Alice said ‘Shish’, and Oswald pretended not to hear.

‘A precious treasure,’ he said, ‘has inadvertently been laid low in the
moat by one of us.’

‘The rotten thing tumbled in by itself,’ Dicky said.

Oswald waved his hand and said, ‘Anyhow, it’s there. It’s our duty to
restore it to its sorrowing owners. I say, look here--we’re going to
drag the moat.’

Everyone brightened up at this. It was our duty and it was interesting
too. This is very uncommon.

So we went out to where the orchard is, at the other side of the moat.
There were gooseberries and things on the bushes, but we did not take
any till we had asked if we might. Alice went and asked. Mrs Pettigrew
said, ‘Law! I suppose so; you’d eat ‘em anyhow, leave or no leave.’

She little knows the honourable nature of the house of Bastable. But she
has much to learn.

The orchard slopes gently down to the dark waters of the moat. We sat
there in the sun and talked about dragging the moat, till Denny said,
‘How DO you drag moats?’

And we were speechless, because, though we had read many times about a
moat being dragged for missing heirs and lost wills, we really had never
thought about exactly how it was done.

‘Grappling-irons are right, I believe,’ Denny said, ‘but I don’t suppose
they’d have any at the farm.’

And we asked, and found they had never even heard of them. I think
myself he meant some other word, but he was quite positive.

So then we got a sheet off Oswald’s bed, and we all took our shoes and
stockings off, and we tried to see if the sheet would drag the bottom
of the moat, which is shallow at that end. But it would keep floating
on the top of the water, and when we tried sewing stones into one end
of it, it stuck on something in the bottom, and when we got it up it was
torn. We were very sorry, and the sheet was in an awful mess; but the
girls said they were sure they could wash it in the basin in their room,
and we thought as we had torn it anyway, we might as well go on. That
washing never came off.

‘No human being,’ Noel said, ‘knows half the treasures hidden in this
dark tarn.’

And we decided we would drag a bit more at that end, and work gradually
round to under the dairy window where the milk-pan was. We could not see
that part very well, because of the bushes that grow between the cracks
of the stones where the house goes down into the moat. And opposite the
dairy window the barn goes straight down into the moat too. It is like
pictures of Venice; but you cannot get opposite the dairy window anyhow.

We got the sheet down again when we had tied the torn parts together in
a bunch with string, and Oswald was just saying--

‘Now then, my hearties, pull together, pull with a will! One, two,
three,’ when suddenly Dora dropped her bit of the sheet with a piercing
shriek and cried out--

‘Oh! it’s all wormy at the bottom. I felt them wriggle.’ And she was out
of the water almost before the words were out of her mouth.

The other girls all scuttled out too, and they let the sheet go in such
a hurry that we had no time to steady ourselves, and one of us went
right in, and the rest got wet up to our waistbands. The one who went
right in was only H. O.; but Dora made an awful fuss and said it was our
fault. We told her what we thought, and it ended in the girls going in
with H. O. to change his things. We had some more gooseberries while
they were gone. Dora was in an awful wax when she went away, but she is
not of a sullen disposition though sometimes hasty, and when they all
came back we saw it was all right, so we said--

‘What shall we do now?’

Alice said, ‘I don’t think we need drag any more. It is wormy. I felt it
when Dora did. And besides, the milk-pan is sticking a bit of itself out
of the water. I saw it through the dairy window.’

‘Couldn’t we get it up with fish-hooks?’ Noel said. But Alice explained
that the dairy was now locked up and the key taken out. So then Oswald
said--

‘Look here, we’ll make a raft. We should have to do it some time, and
we might as well do it now. I saw an old door in that corner stable that
they don’t use. You know. The one where they chop the wood.’

We got the door.

We had never made a raft, any of us, but the way to make rafts is better
described in books, so we knew what to do.

We found some nice little tubs stuck up on the fence of the farm garden,
and nobody seemed to want them for anything just then, so we took them.
Denny had a box of tools someone had given him for his last birthday;
they were rather rotten little things, but the gimlet worked all right,
so we managed to make holes in the edges of the tubs and fasten them
with string under the four corners of the old door. This took us a long
time. Albert’s uncle asked us at dinner what we had been playing at, and
we said it was a secret, and it was nothing wrong. You see we wished to
atone for Dicky’s mistake before anything more was said. The house has
no windows in the side that faces the orchard.

The rays of the afternoon sun were beaming along the orchard grass when
at last we launched the raft. She floated out beyond reach with the last
shove of the launching. But Oswald waded out and towed her back; he is
not afraid of worms. Yet if he had known of the other things that were
in the bottom of that moat he would have kept his boots on. So would the
others, especially Dora, as you will see.

At last the gallant craft rode upon the waves. We manned her, though not
up to our full strength, because if more than four got on the water came
up too near our knees, and we feared she might founder if over-manned.

Daisy and Denny did not want to go on the raft, white mice that they
were, so that was all right. And as H. O. had been wet through once he
was not very keen. Alice promised Noel her best paint-brush if he’d give
up and not go, because we knew well that the voyage was fraught with
deep dangers, though the exact danger that lay in wait for us under the
dairy window we never even thought of.

So we four elder ones got on the raft very carefully; and even then,
every time we moved the water swished up over the raft and hid our feet.
But I must say it was a jolly decent raft.

Dicky was captain, because it was his adventure. We had hop-poles from
the hop-garden beyond the orchard to punt with. We made the girls stand
together in the middle and hold on to each other to keep steady. Then
we christened our gallant vessel. We called it the Richard, after Dicky,
and also after the splendid admiral who used to eat wine-glasses and
died after the Battle of the Revenge in Tennyson’s poetry.

Then those on shore waved a fond adieu as well as they could with the
dampness of their handkerchiefs, which we had had to use to dry our legs
and feet when we put on our stockings for dinner, and slowly and stately
the good ship moved away from shore, riding on the waves as though they
were her native element.

We kept her going with the hop-poles, and we kept her steady in the same
way, but we could not always keep her steady enough, and we could not
always keep her in the wind’s eye. That is to say, she went where we did
not want, and once she bumped her corner against the barn wall, and
all the crew had to sit down suddenly to avoid falling overboard into a
watery grave. Of course then the waves swept her decks, and when we got
up again we said that we should have to change completely before tea.

But we pressed on undaunted, and at last our saucy craft came into port,
under the dairy window and there was the milk-pan, for whose sake we
had endured such hardships and privations, standing up on its edge quite
quietly.

The girls did not wait for orders from the captain, as they ought to
have done; but they cried out, ‘Oh, here it is!’ and then both reached
out to get it. Anyone who has pursued a naval career will see that of
course the raft capsized. For a moment it felt like standing on the roof
of the house, and the next moment the ship stood up on end and shot the
whole crew into the dark waters.

We boys can swim all right. Oswald has swum three times across the
Ladywell Swimming Baths at the shallow end, and Dicky is nearly as good;
but just then we did not think of this; though, of course, if the water
had been deep we should have.

As soon as Oswald could get the muddy water out of his eyes he opened
them on a horrid scene.

Dicky was standing up to his shoulders in the inky waters; the raft had
righted itself, and was drifting gently away towards the front of the
house, where the bridge is, and Dora and Alice were rising from the
deep, with their hair all plastered over their faces--like Venus in the
Latin verses.

There was a great noise of splashing. And besides that a feminine voice,
looking out of the dairy window and screaming--

‘Lord love the children!’

It was Mrs Pettigrew. She disappeared at once, and we were sorry we
were in such a situation that she would be able to get at Albert’s uncle
before we could. Afterwards we were not so sorry.

Before a word could be spoken about our desperate position Dora
staggered a little in the water, and suddenly shrieked, ‘Oh, my foot!
oh, it’s a shark! I know it is--or a crocodile!’

The others on the bank could hear her shrieking, but they could not
see us properly; they did not know what was happening. Noel told me
afterwards he never could care for that paint-brush.

Of course we knew it could not be a shark, but I thought of pike, which
are large and very angry always, and I caught hold of Dora. She screamed
without stopping. I shoved her along to where there was a ledge of
brickwork, and shoved her up, till she could sit on it, then she got her
foot out of the water, still screaming.

It was indeed terrible. The thing she thought was a shark came up with
her foot, and it was a horrid, jagged, old meat-tin, and she had put
her foot right into it. Oswald got it off, and directly he did so blood
began to pour from the wounds. The tin edges had cut it in several
spots. It was very pale blood, because her foot was wet, of course.

She stopped screaming, and turned green, and I thought she was going to
faint, like Daisy did on the jungle day.

Oswald held her up as well as he could, but it really was one of the
least agreeable moments in his life. For the raft was gone, and she
couldn’t have waded back anyway, and we didn’t know how deep the moat
might be in other places.

But Mrs Pettigrew had not been idle. She is not a bad sort really.

Just as Oswald was wondering whether he could swim after the raft and
get it back, a boat’s nose shot out from under a dark archway a little
further up under the house. It was the boathouse, and Albert’s uncle had
got the punt and took us back in it. When we had regained the dark arch
where the boat lives we had to go up the cellar stairs. Dora had to be
carried.

There was but little said to us that day. We were sent to bed--those who
had not been on the raft the same as the others, for they owned up all
right, and Albert’s uncle is the soul of justice.

Next day but one was Saturday. Father gave us a talking to--with other
things.

The worst was when Dora couldn’t get her shoe on, so they sent for the
doctor, and Dora had to lie down for ever so long. It was indeed poor
luck.

When the doctor had gone Alice said to me--

‘It IS hard lines, but Dora’s very jolly about it. Daisy’s been telling
her about how we should all go to her with our little joys and sorrows
and things, and about the sweet influence from a sick bed that can be
felt all over the house, like in What Katy Did, and Dora said she hoped
she might prove a blessing to us all while she’s laid up.’

Oswald said he hoped so, but he was not pleased. Because this sort
of jaw was exactly the sort of thing he and Dicky didn’t want to have
happen.

The thing we got it hottest for was those little tubs off the garden
railings. They turned out to be butter-tubs that had been put out there
‘to sweeten’.

But as Denny said, ‘After the mud in that moat not all the perfumes of
somewhere or other could make them fit to use for butter again.’

I own this was rather a bad business. Yet we did not do it to please
ourselves, but because it was our duty. But that made no difference to
our punishment when Father came down. I have known this mistake occur
before.



CHAPTER 3. BILL’S TOMBSTONE

There were soldiers riding down the road, on horses two and two. That
is the horses were two and two, and the men not. Because each man was
riding one horse and leading another. To exercise them. They came from
Chatham Barracks. We all drew up in a line outside the churchyard wall,
and saluted as they went by, though we had not read Toady Lion then. We
have since. It is the only decent book I have ever read written by Toady
Lion’s author. The others are mere piffle. But many people like them. In
Sir Toady Lion the officer salutes the child.

There was only a lieutenant with those soldiers, and he did not salute
me. He kissed his hand to the girls; and a lot of the soldiers behind
kissed theirs too. We waved ours back.

Next day we made a Union Jack out of pocket-handkerchiefs and part of a
red flannel petticoat of the White Mouse’s, which she did not want just
then, and some blue ribbon we got at the village shop.

Then we watched for the soldiers, and after three days they went by
again, by twos and twos as before. It was A1.

We waved our flag, and we shouted. We gave them three cheers. Oswald can
shout loudest. So as soon as the first man was level with us (not the
advance guard, but the first of the battery)--he shouted--

‘Three cheers for the Queen and the British Army!’ And then we waved the
flag, and bellowed. Oswald stood on the wall to bellow better, and Denny
waved the flag because he was a visitor, and so politeness made us let
him enjoy the fat of whatever there was going.

The soldiers did not cheer that day; they only grinned and kissed their
hands.

The next day we all got up as much like soldiers as we could. H. O. and
Noel had tin swords, and we asked Albert’s uncle to let us wear some of
the real arms that are on the wall in the dining-room.

And he said, ‘Yes’, if we would clean them up afterwards. But we
jolly well cleaned them up first with Brooke’s soap and brick dust and
vinegar, and the knife polish (invented by the great and immortal Duke
of Wellington in his spare time when he was not conquering Napoleon.
Three cheers for our Iron Duke!), and with emery paper and wash leather
and whitening. Oswald wore a cavalry sabre in its sheath. Alice and the
Mouse had pistols in their belts, large old flint-locks, with bits
of red flannel behind the flints. Denny had a naval cutlass, a very
beautiful blade, and old enough to have been at Trafalgar. I hope
it was. The others had French sword-bayonets that were used in the
Franco-German war. They are very bright when you get them bright, but
the sheaths are hard to polish. Each sword-bayonet has the name on the
blade of the warrior who once wielded it. I wonder where they are now.
Perhaps some of them died in the war. Poor chaps! But it is a very long
time ago.

I should like to be a soldier. It is better than going to the best
schools, and to Oxford afterwards, even if it is Balliol you go to.
Oswald wanted to go to South Africa for a bugler, but father would not
let him. And it is true that Oswald does not yet know how to bugle,
though he can play the infantry ‘advance’, and the ‘charge’ and the
‘halt’ on a penny whistle. Alice taught them to him with the piano, out
of the red book Father’s cousin had when he was in the Fighting Fifth.
Oswald cannot play the ‘retire’, and he would scorn to do so. But I
suppose a bugler has to play what he is told, no matter how galling to
the young boy’s proud spirit.

The next day, being thoroughly armed, we put on everything red, white
and blue that we could think of--night-shirts are good for white, and
you don’t know what you can do with red socks and blue jerseys till you
try--and we waited by the churchyard wall for the soldiers. When the
advance guard (or whatever you call it of artillery--it’s that for
infantry, I know) came by, we got ready, and when the first man of the
first battery was level with us Oswald played on his penny whistle the
‘advance’ and the ‘charge’--and then shouted--

‘Three cheers for the Queen and the British Army!’ This time they had
the guns with them. And every man of the battery cheered too. It was
glorious. It made you tremble all over. The girls said it made them
want to cry--but no boy would own to this, even if it were true. It is
babyish to cry. But it was glorious, and Oswald felt differently to what
he ever did before.

Then suddenly the officer in front said, ‘Battery! Halt!’ and all the
soldiers pulled their horses up, and the great guns stopped too. Then
the officer said, ‘Sit at ease,’ and something else, and the sergeant
repeated it, and some of the men got off their horses and lit their
pipes, and some sat down on the grass edge of the road, holding their
horses’ bridles.

We could see all the arms and accoutrements as plain as plain.

Then the officer came up to us. We were all standing on the wall that
day, except Dora, who had to sit, because her foot was bad, but we let
her have the three-edged rapier to wear, and the blunderbuss to hold as
well--it has a brass mouth and is like in Mr Caldecott’s pictures.

He was a beautiful man the officer. Like a Viking. Very tall and fair,
with moustaches very long, and bright blue eyes. He said--

‘Good morning.’

So did we.

Then he said--

‘You seem to be a military lot.’

We said we wished we were.

‘And patriotic,’ said he.

Alice said she should jolly well think so.

Then he said he had noticed us there for several days, and he had halted
the battery because he thought we might like to look at the guns.

Alas! there are but too few grown-up people so far-seeing and thoughtful
as this brave and distinguished officer.

We said, ‘Oh, yes’, and then we got off the wall, and that good
and noble man showed us the string that moves the detonator and the
breech-block (when you take it out and carry it away the gun is in vain
to the enemy, even if he takes it); and he let us look down the gun to
see the rifling, all clean and shiny--and he showed us the ammunition
boxes, but there was nothing in them. He also told us how the gun was
unlimbered (this means separating the gun from the ammunition carriage),
and how quick it could be done--but he did not make the men do this
then, because they were resting. There were six guns. Each had painted
on the carriage, in white letters, 15 Pr., which the captain told us
meant fifteen-pounder.

‘I should have thought the gun weighed more than fifteen pounds,’ Dora
said. ‘It would if it was beef, but I suppose wood and gun are lighter.’

And the officer explained to her very kindly and patiently that 15 Pr.
meant the gun could throw a SHELL weighing fifteen pounds.

When we had told him how jolly it was to see the soldiers go by so
often, he said--

‘You won’t see us many more times. We’re ordered to the front; and we
sail on Tuesday week; and the guns will be painted mud-colour, and the
men will wear mud-colour too, and so shall I.’

The men looked very nice, though they were not wearing their busbies,
but only Tommy caps, put on all sorts of ways.

We were very sorry they were going, but Oswald, as well as others,
looked with envy on those who would soon be allowed--being grown up, and
no nonsense about your education--to go and fight for their Queen and
country.

Then suddenly Alice whispered to Oswald, and he said--

‘All right; but tell him yourself.’

So Alice said to the captain--

‘Will you stop next time you pass?’

He said, ‘I’m afraid I can’t promise that.’

Alice said, ‘You might; there’s a particular reason.’

He said, ‘What?’ which was a natural remark; not rude, as it is with
children. Alice said--

‘We want to give the soldiers a keepsake and will write to ask my
father. He is very well off just now. Look here--if we’re not on the
wall when you come by, don’t stop; but if we are, please, PLEASE do!’

The officer pulled his moustache and looked as if he did not know;
but at last he said ‘Yes’, and we were very glad, though but Alice and
Oswald knew the dark but pleasant scheme at present fermenting in their
youthful nuts.

The captain talked a lot to us. At last Noel said--

‘I think you are like Diarmid of the Golden Collar. But I should like to
see your sword out, and shining in the sun like burnished silver.’

The captain laughed and grasped the hilt of his good blade. But Oswald
said hurriedly--

‘Don’t. Not yet. We shan’t ever have a chance like this. If you’d only
show us the pursuing practice! Albert’s uncle knows it; but he only does
it on an armchair, because he hasn’t a horse.’

And that brave and swagger captain did really do it. He rode his horse
right into our gate when we opened it, and showed us all the cuts,
thrusts, and guards. There are four of each kind. It was splendid. The
morning sun shone on his flashing blade, and his good steed stood with
all its legs far apart and stiff on the lawn.

Then we opened the paddock gate, and he did it again, while the horse
galloped as if upon the bloody battlefield among the fierce foes of his
native land, and this was far more ripping still.

Then we thanked him very much, and he went away, taking his men with
him. And the guns of course.

Then we wrote to my father, and he said ‘Yes’, as we knew he would, and
next time the soldiers came by--but they had no guns this time, only
the captive Arabs of the desert--we had the keepsakes ready in a
wheelbarrow, and we were on the churchyard wall.

And the bold captain called an immediate halt.

Then the girls had the splendid honour and pleasure of giving a pipe and
four whole ounces of tobacco to each soldier.

Then we shook hands with the captain, and the sergeant and the
corporals, and the girls kissed the captain--I can’t think why girls
will kiss everybody--and we all cheered for the Queen. It was grand. And
I wish my father had been there to see how much you can do with L12 if
you order the things from the Stores.

We have never seen those brave soldiers again.

I have told you all this to show you how we got so keen about soldiers,
and why we sought to aid and abet the poor widow at the white cottage in
her desolate and oppressedness.

Her name was Simpkins, and her cottage was just beyond the churchyard,
on the other side from our house. On the different military occasions
which I have remarked upon this widow woman stood at her garden gate and
looked on. And after the cheering she rubbed her eyes with her apron.
Alice noticed this slight but signifying action.

We feel quite sure Mrs Simpkins liked soldiers, and so we felt friendly
to her. But when we tried to talk to her she would not. She told us to
go along with us, do, and not bother her. And Oswald, with his usual
delicacy and good breeding, made the others do as she said.

But we were not to be thus repulsed with impunity. We made complete but
cautious inquiries, and found out that the reason she cried when she saw
soldiers was that she had only one son, a boy. He was twenty-two, and he
had gone to the War last April. So that she thought of him when she saw
the soldiers, and that was why she cried. Because when your son is at
the wars you always think he is being killed. I don’t know why. A great
many of them are not. If I had a son at the wars I should never think
he was dead till I heard he was, and perhaps not then, considering
everything. After we had found this out we held a council.

Dora said, ‘We must do something for the soldier’s widowed mother.’

We all agreed, but added ‘What?’

Alice said, ‘The gift of money might be deemed an insult by that proud,
patriotic spirit. Besides, we haven’t more than eighteenpence among us.’

We had put what we had to father’s L12 to buy the baccy and pipes.

The Mouse then said, ‘Couldn’t we make her a flannel petticoat and leave
it without a word upon her doorstep?’

But everyone said, ‘Flannel petticoats in this weather?’ so that was no
go.

Noel said he would write her a poem, but Oswald had a deep, inward
feeling that Mrs Simpkins would not understand poetry. Many people do
not.

H. O. said, ‘Why not sing “Rule Britannia” under her window after she
had gone to bed, like waits,’ but no one else thought so.

Denny thought we might get up a subscription for her among the wealthy
and affluent, but we said again that we knew money would be no balm to
the haughty mother of a brave British soldier.

‘What we want,’ Alice said, ‘is something that will be a good deal of
trouble to us and some good to her.’

‘A little help is worth a deal of poetry,’ said Denny.

I should not have said that myself. Noel did look sick.

‘What DOES she do that we can help in?’ Dora asked. ‘Besides, she won’t
let us help.’

H. O. said, ‘She does nothing but work in the garden. At least if she
does anything inside you can’t see it, because she keeps the door shut.’

Then at once we saw. And we agreed to get up the very next day, ere
yet the rosy dawn had flushed the east, and have a go at Mrs Simpkins’s
garden.

We got up. We really did. But too often when you mean to, overnight,
it seems so silly to do it when you come to waking in the dewy morn. We
crept downstairs with our boots in our hands. Denny is rather unlucky,
though a most careful boy. It was he who dropped his boot, and it went
blundering down the stairs, echoing like thunderbolts, and waking up
Albert’s uncle. But when we explained to him that we were going to do
some gardening he let us, and went back to bed.

Everything is very pretty and different in the early morning, before
people are up. I have been told this is because the shadows go a
different way from what they do in the awake part of the day. But I
don’t know. Noel says the fairies have just finished tidying up then.
Anyhow it all feels quite otherwise.

We put on our boots in the porch, and we got our gardening tools and we
went down to the white cottage. It is a nice cottage, with a thatched
roof, like in the drawing copies you get at girls’ schools, and you
do the thatch--if you can--with a B.B. pencil. If you cannot, you just
leave it. It looks just as well, somehow, when it is mounted and framed.

We looked at the garden. It was very neat. Only one patch was coming up
thick with weeds. I could see groundsel and chickweed, and others that I
did not know. We set to work with a will. We used all our tools--spades,
forks, hoes, and rakes--and Dora worked with the trowel, sitting down,
because her foot was hurt. We cleared the weedy patch beautifully,
scraping off all the nasty weeds and leaving the nice clean brown dirt.
We worked as hard as ever we could. And we were happy, because it was
unselfish toil, and no one thought then of putting it in the Book of
Golden Deeds, where we had agreed to write down our virtuous actions and
the good doings of each other, when we happen to notice them.

We had just done, and we were looking at the beautiful production of
our honest labour, when the cottage door burst open, and the soldier’s
widowed mother came out like a wild tornado, and her eyes looked like
upas trees--death to the beholder.

‘You wicked, meddlesome, nasty children!’ she said, ain’t you got enough
of your own good ground to runch up and spoil, but you must come into MY
little lot?’

Some of us were deeply alarmed, but we stood firm.

‘We have only been weeding your garden,’ Dora said; ‘we wanted to do
something to help you.’

‘Dratted little busybodies,’ she said. It was indeed hard, but everyone
in Kent says ‘dratted’ when they are cross. ‘It’s my turnips,’ she went
on, ‘you’ve hoed up, and my cabbages. My turnips that my boy sowed
afore he went. There, get along with you do, afore I come at you with my
broom-handle.’

She did come at us with her broom-handle as she spoke, and even the
boldest turned and fled. Oswald was even the boldest. ‘They looked like
weeds right enough,’ he said.

And Dicky said, ‘It all comes of trying to do golden deeds.’ This was
when we were out in the road.

As we went along, in a silence full of gloomy remorse, we met the
postman. He said--

‘Here’s the letters for the Moat,’ and passed on hastily. He was a bit
late.

When we came to look through the letters, which were nearly all for
Albert’s uncle, we found there was a postcard that had got stuck in a
magazine wrapper. Alice pulled it out. It was addressed to Mrs Simpkins.
We honourably only looked at the address, although it is allowed by the
rules of honourableness to read postcards that come to your house if you
like, even if they are not for you.

After a heated discussion, Alice and Oswald said they were not afraid,
whoever was, and they retraced their steps, Alice holding the postcard
right way up, so that we should not look at the lettery part of it, but
only the address.

With quickly-beating heart, but outwardly unmoved, they walked up to the
white cottage door.

It opened with a bang when we knocked.

‘Well?’ Mrs Simpkins said, and I think she said it what people in books
call ‘sourly’.

Oswald said, ‘We are very, very sorry we spoiled your turnips, and we
will ask my father to try and make it up to you some other way.’

She muttered something about not wanting to be beholden to anybody.

‘We came back,’ Oswald went on, with his always unruffled politeness,
‘because the postman gave us a postcard in mistake with our letters, and
it is addressed to you.’

‘We haven’t read it,’ Alice said quickly. I think she needn’t have said
that. Of course we hadn’t. But perhaps girls know better than we do what
women are likely to think you capable of.

The soldier’s mother took the postcard (she snatched it really, but
‘took’ is a kinder word, considering everything) and she looked at the
address a long time. Then she turned it over and read what was on the
back. Then she drew her breath in as far as it would go, and caught hold
of the door-post. Her face got awful. It was like the wax face of a dead
king I saw once at Madame Tussaud’s.

Alice understood. She caught hold of the soldier’s mother’s hand and
said--

‘Oh, NO--it’s NOT your boy Bill!’

And the woman said nothing, but shoved the postcard into Alice’s hand,
and we both read it--and it WAS her boy Bill.

Alice gave her back the card. She had held on to the woman’s hand all
the time, and now she squeezed the hand, and held it against her face.
But she could not say a word because she was crying so. The soldier’s
mother took the card again and she pushed Alice away, but it was not an
unkind push, and she went in and shut the door; and as Alice and Oswald
went down the road Oswald looked back, and one of the windows of the
cottage had a white blind. Afterwards the other windows had too. There
were no blinds really to the cottage. It was aprons and things she had
pinned up.

Alice cried most of the morning, and so did the other girls. We wanted
to do something for the soldier’s mother, but you can do nothing when
people’s sons are shot. It is the most dreadful thing to want to do
something for people who are unhappy, and not to know what to do.

It was Noel who thought of what we COIULD do at last.

He said, ‘I suppose they don’t put up tombstones to soldiers when they
die in war. But there--I mean Oswald said, ‘Of course not.’

Noel said, ‘I daresay you’ll think it’s silly, but I don’t care. Don’t
you think she’d like it, if we put one up to HIM? Not in the churchyard,
of course, because we shouldn’t be let, but in our garden, just where it
joins on to the churchyard?’

And we all thought it was a first-rate idea.

This is what we meant to put on the tombstone:


          ‘Here lies

          BILL SIMPKINS

     Who died fighting for Queen

          and Country.’


               ‘A faithful son,
               A son so dear,
               A soldier brave
               Lies buried here.’


Then we remembered that poor brave Bill was really buried far away in
the Southern hemisphere, if at all. So we altered it to--


               ‘A soldier brave
               We weep for here.’


Then we looked out a nice flagstone in the stable-yard, and we got a
cold chisel out of the Dentist’s toolbox, and began.

But stone-cutting is difficult and dangerous work.

Oswald went at it a bit, but he chipped his thumb, and it bled so he had
to chuck it. Then Dicky tried, and then Denny, but Dicky hammered his
finger, and Denny took all day over every stroke, so that by tea-time
we had only done the H, and about half the E--and the E was awfully
crooked. Oswald chipped his thumb over the H.

We looked at it the next morning, and even the most sanguinary of us saw
that it was a hopeless task.

Then Denny said, ‘Why not wood and paint?’ and he showed us how. We
got a board and two stumps from the carpenter’s in the village, and we
painted it all white, and when that was dry Denny did the words on it.

It was something like this:

          ‘IN MEMORY OF
          BILL SIMPKINS

     DEAD FOR QUEEN AND COUNTRY.

     HONOUR TO HIS NAME AND ALL

     OTHER BRAVE SOLDIERS.’


We could not get in what we meant to at first, so we had to give up the
poetry.

We fixed it up when it was dry. We had to dig jolly deep to get the
posts to stand up, but the gardener helped us.

Then the girls made wreaths of white flowers, roses and Canterbury
bells, and lilies and pinks, and sweet-peas and daisies, and put them
over the posts. And I think if Bill Simpkins had known how sorry we
were, he would have been glad. Oswald only hopes if he falls on the wild
battlefield, which is his highest ambition, that somebody will be as
sorry about him as he was about Bill, that’s all!

When all was done, and what flowers there were over from the wreaths
scattered under the tombstone between the posts, we wrote a letter to
Mrs Simpkins, and said--


DEAR MRS SIMPKINS--

We are very, very sorry about the turnips and things, and we beg your
pardon humbly. We have put up a tombstone to your brave son.


And we signed our names. Alice took the letter.

The soldier’s mother read it, and said something about our oughting to
know better than to make fun of people’s troubles with our tombstones
and tomfoolery.

Alice told me she could not help crying.

She said--

‘It’s not! it’s NOT! Dear, DEAR Mrs Simpkins, do come with me and see!
You don’t know how sorry we are about Bill. Do come and see.

We can go through the churchyard, and the others have all gone in, so as
to leave it quiet for you. Do come.’

And Mrs Simpkins did. And when she read what we had put up, and Alice
told her the verse we had not had room for, she leant against the wall
by the grave--I mean the tombstone--and Alice hugged her, and they both
cried bitterly. The poor soldier’s mother was very, very pleased, and
she forgave us about the turnips, and we were friends after that, but
she always liked Alice the best. A great many people do, somehow.

After that we used to put fresh flowers every day on Bill’s tombstone,
and I do believe his mother was pleased, though she got us to move it
away from the churchyard edge and put it in a corner of our garden under
a laburnum, where people could not see it from the church. But you could
from the road, though I think she thought you couldn’t. She came every
day to look at the new wreaths. When the white flowers gave out we put
coloured, and she liked it just as well.

About a fortnight after the erecting of the tombstone the girls were
putting fresh wreaths on it when a soldier in a red coat came down the
road, and he stopped and looked at us. He walked with a stick, and he
had a bundle in a blue cotton handkerchief, and one arm in a sling.

And he looked again, and he came nearer, and he leaned on the wall, so
that he could read the black printing on the white paint.

And he grinned all over his face, and he said--

‘Well, I AM blessed!’

And he read it all out in a sort of half whisper, and when he came to
the end, where it says, ‘and all such brave soldiers’, he said--

‘Well, I really AM!’ I suppose he meant he really was blessed. Oswald
thought it was like the soldier’s cheek, so he said--

‘I daresay you aren’t so very blessed as you think. What’s it to do with
you, anyway, eh, Tommy?’

Of course Oswald knew from Kipling that an infantry soldier is called
that. The soldier said--

‘Tommy yourself, young man. That’s ME!’ and he pointed to the tombstone.

We stood rooted to the spot. Alice spoke first.

‘Then you’re Bill, and you’re not dead,’ she said. ‘Oh, Bill, I am so
glad! Do let ME tell your mother.’

She started running, and so did we all. Bill had to go slowly because of
his leg, but I tell you he went as fast as ever he could.

We all hammered at the soldier’s mother’s door, and shouted--

‘Come out! come out!’ and when she opened the door we were going to
speak, but she pushed us away, and went tearing down the garden path
like winking. I never saw a grown-up woman run like it, because she saw
Bill coming.

She met him at the gate, running right into him, and caught hold of him,
and she cried much more than when she thought he was dead.

And we all shook his hand and said how glad we were.

The soldier’s mother kept hold of him with both hands, and I couldn’t
help looking at her face. It was like wax that had been painted on both
pink cheeks, and the eyes shining like candles. And when we had all said
how glad we were, she said--

‘Thank the dear Lord for His mercies,’ and she took her boy Bill into
the cottage and shut the door.

We went home and chopped up the tombstone with the wood-axe and had a
blazing big bonfire, and cheered till we could hardly speak.

The postcard was a mistake; he was only missing. There was a pipe and
a whole pound of tobacco left over from our keepsake to the other
soldiers. We gave it to Bill. Father is going to have him for
under-gardener when his wounds get well. He’ll always be a bit lame, so
he cannot fight any more.



CHAPTER 4. THE TOWER OF MYSTERY

It was very rough on Dora having her foot bad, but we took it in turns
to stay in with her, and she was very decent about it. Daisy was most
with her. I do not dislike Daisy, but I wish she had been taught how to
play. Because Dora is rather like that naturally, and sometimes I have
thought that Daisy makes her worse.

I talked to Albert’s uncle about it one day, when the others had gone to
church, and I did not go because of ear-ache, and he said it came
from reading the wrong sort of books partly--she has read Ministering
Children, and Anna Ross, or The Orphan of Waterloo, and Ready Work for
Willing Hands, and Elsie, or Like a Little Candle, and even a horrid
little blue book about the something or other of Little Sins. After this
conversation Oswald took care she had plenty of the right sort of books
to read, and he was surprised and pleased when she got up early one
morning to finish Monte Cristo. Oswald felt that he was really being
useful to a suffering fellow-creature when he gave Daisy books that were
not all about being good.

A few days after Dora was laid up, Alice called a council of the
Wouldbegoods, and Oswald and Dicky attended with darkly-clouded brows.
Alice had the minute-book, which was an exercise-book that had not much
written in it. She had begun at the other end. I hate doing that myself,
because there is so little room at the top compared with right way up.

Dora and a sofa had been carried out on to the lawn, and we were on the
grass. It was very hot and dry. We had sherbet. Alice read:

‘“Society of the Wouldbegoods.

‘“We have not done much. Dicky mended a window, and we got the milk-pan
out of the moat that dropped through where he mended it. Dora, Oswald,
Dicky and me got upset in the moat. This was not goodness. Dora’s foot
was hurt. We hope to do better next time.”’


Then came Noel’s poem:


     ‘We are the Wouldbegoods Society,
     We are not good yet, but we mean to try,
     And if we try, and if we don’t succeed,
     It must mean we are very bad indeed.’


This sounded so much righter than Noel’s poetry generally does, that
Oswald said so, and Noel explained that Denny had helped him.

‘He seems to know the right length for lines of poetry. I suppose it
comes of learning so much at school,’ Noel said.

Then Oswald proposed that anybody should be allowed to write in the
book if they found out anything good that anyone else had done, but not
things that were public acts; and nobody was to write about themselves,
or anything other people told them, only what they found out.

After a brief jaw the others agreed, and Oswald felt, not for the first
time in his young life, that he would have made a good diplomatic hero
to carry despatches and outwit the other side. For now he had put it
out of the minute-book’s power to be the kind of thing readers of
Ministering Children would have wished.

‘And if anyone tells other people any good thing he’s done he is to go
to Coventry for the rest of the day.’

And Denny remarked, ‘We shall do good by stealth, and blush to find it
shame.’

After that nothing was written in the book for some time. I looked
about, and so did the others, but I never caught anyone in the act of
doing anything extra; though several of the others have told me since of
things they did at this time, and really wondered nobody had noticed.

I think I said before that when you tell a story you cannot tell
everything. It would be silly to do it. Because ordinary kinds of play
are dull to read about; and the only other thing is meals, and to dwell
on what you eat is greedy and not like a hero at all. A hero is always
contented with a venison pasty and a horn of sack. All the same, the
meals were very interesting; with things you do not get at home--Lent
pies with custard and currants in them, sausage rolls and fiede cakes,
and raisin cakes and apple turnovers, and honeycomb and syllabubs,
besides as much new milk as you cared about, and cream now and then,
and cheese always on the table for tea. Father told Mrs Pettigrew to get
what meals she liked, and she got these strange but attractive foods.

In a story about Wouldbegoods it is not proper to tell of times when
only some of us were naughty, so I will pass lightly over the time when
Noel got up the kitchen chimney and brought three bricks and an old
starling’s nest and about a ton of soot down with him when he fell. They
never use the big chimney in the summer, but cook in the wash-house. Nor
do I wish to dwell on what H. O. did when he went into the dairy. I do
not know what his motive was. But Mrs Pettigrew said SHE knew; and she
locked him in, and said if it was cream he wanted he should have enough,
and she wouldn’t let him out till tea-time. The cat had also got into
the dairy for some reason of her own, and when H. O. was tired of
whatever he went in for he poured all the milk into the churn and tried
to teach the cat to swim in it. He must have been desperate. The cat did
not even try to learn, and H. O. had the scars on his hands for weeks.
I do not wish to tell tales of H. O., for he is very young, and whatever
he does he always catches it for; but I will just allude to our being
told not to eat the greengages in the garden. And we did not. And
whatever H. O. did was Noel’s fault--for Noel told H. O. that greengages
would grow again all right if you did not bite as far as the stone, just
as wounds are not mortal except when you are pierced through the heart.
So the two of them bit bites out of every greengage they could reach.
And of course the pieces did not grow again.

Oswald did not do things like these, but then he is older than his
brothers. The only thing he did just about then was making a booby-trap
for Mrs Pettigrew when she had locked H. O. up in the dairy, and
unfortunately it was the day she was going out in her best things, and
part of the trap was a can of water. Oswald was not willingly vicious;
it was but a light and thoughtless act which he had every reason to
be sorry for afterwards. And he is sorry even without those reasons,
because he knows it is ungentlemanly to play tricks on women.

I remember Mother telling Dora and me when we were little that you ought
to be very kind and polite to servants, because they have to work very
hard, and do not have so many good times as we do. I used to think about
Mother more at the Moat House than I did at Blackheath, especially in
the garden. She was very fond of flowers, and she used to tell us about
the big garden where she used to live; and I remember Dora and I helped
her to plant seeds. But it is no use wishing. She would have liked that
garden, though.

The girls and the white mice did not do anything boldly wicked--though
of course they used to borrow Mrs Pettigrew’s needles, which made her
very nasty. Needles that are borrowed might just as well be stolen. But
I say no more.

I have only told you these things to show the kind of events which
occurred on the days I don’t tell you about. On the whole, we had an
excellent time.

It was on the day we had the pillow-fight that we went for the long
walk. Not the Pilgrimage--that is another story. We did not mean to have
a pillow-fight. It is not usual to have them after breakfast, but Oswald
had come up to get his knife out of the pocket of his Etons, to cut some
wire we were making rabbit snares of. It is a very good knife, with a
file in it, as well as a corkscrew and other things--and he did not come
down at once, because he was detained by having to make an apple-pie bed
for Dicky. Dicky came up after him to see what he was up to, and when he
did see he buzzed a pillow at Oswald, and the fight began. The others,
hearing the noise of battle from afar, hastened to the field of action,
all except Dora, who couldn’t because of being laid up with her foot,
and Daisy, because she is a little afraid of us still, when we are
all together. She thinks we are rough. This comes of having only one
brother.

Well, the fight was a very fine one. Alice backed me up, and Noel and
H. O. backed Dicky, and Denny heaved a pillow or two; but he cannot shy
straight, so I don’t know which side he was on.

And just as the battle raged most fiercely, Mrs Pettigrew came in and
snatched the pillows away, and shook those of the warriors who were
small enough for it. SHE was rough if you like. She also used language I
should have thought she would be above. She said, Drat you!’ and
‘Drabbit you!’ The last is a thing I have never heard said before.
She said--

‘There’s no peace of your life with you children. Drat your antics! And
that poor, dear, patient gentleman right underneath, with his headache
and his handwriting: and you rampaging about over his head like young
bull-calves. I wonder you haven’t more sense, a great girl like you.’

She said this to Alice, and Alice answered gently, as we are told to
do--

‘I really am awfully sorry; we forgot about the headache. Don’t be
cross, Mrs Pettigrew; we didn’t mean to; we didn’t think.’

‘You never do,’ she said, and her voice, though grumpy, was no longer
violent. ‘Why on earth you can’t take yourselves off for the day I don’t
know.’

We all said, ‘But may we?’

She said, ‘Of course you may. Now put on your boots and go for a good
long walk. And I’ll tell you what--I’ll put you up a snack, and you can
have an egg to your tea to make up for missing your dinner. Now don’t go
clattering about the stairs and passages, there’s good children. See if
you can’t be quiet this once, and give the good gentleman a chance with
his copying.’

She went off. Her bark is worse than her bite. She does not understand
anything about writing books, though. She thinks Albert’s uncle copies
things out of printed books, when he is really writing new ones. I
wonder how she thinks printed books get made first of all. Many servants
are like this.

She gave us the ‘snack’ in a basket, and sixpence to buy milk with. She
said any of the farms would let us have it, only most likely it would be
skim. We thanked her politely, and she hurried us out of the front door
as if we’d been chickens on a pansy bed.

(I did not know till after I had left the farm gate open, and the hens
had got into the garden, that these feathered bipeds display a great
partiality for the young buds of plants of the genus viola, to which
they are extremely destructive. I was told that by the gardener. I
looked it up in the gardening book afterwards to be sure he was right.
You do learn a lot of things in the country.)

We went through the garden as far as the church, and then we rested
a bit in the porch, and just looked into the basket to see what the
‘snack’ was. It proved to be sausage rolls and queen cakes, and a Lent
pie in a round tin dish, and some hard-boiled eggs, and some apples. We
all ate the apples at once, so as not to have to carry them about with
us. The churchyard smells awfully good. It is the wild thyme that grows
on the graves. This is another thing we did not know before we came into
the country.

Then the door of the church tower was ajar, and we all went up; it had
always been locked before when we had tried it.

We saw the ringers’ loft where the ends of the bellropes hang down with
long, furry handles to them like great caterpillars, some red, and some
blue and white, but we did not pull them. And then we went up to where
the bells are, very big and dusty among large dirty beams; and four
windows with no glass, only shutters like Venetian blinds, but they
won’t pull up. There were heaps of straws and sticks on the window
ledges. We think they were owls’ nests, but we did not see any owls.

Then the tower stairs got very narrow and dark, and we went on up, and
we came to a door and opened it suddenly, and it was like being hit in
the face, the light was so sudden. And there we were on the top of
the tower, which is flat, and people have cut their names on it, and a
turret at one corner, and a low wall all round, up and down, like castle
battlements. And we looked down and saw the roof of the church, and the
leads, and the churchyard, and our garden, and the Moat House, and the
farm, and Mrs Simpkins’s cottage, looking very small, and other farms
looking like toy things out of boxes, and we saw corn-fields and meadows
and pastures. A pasture is not the same thing as a meadow, whatever you
may think. And we saw the tops of trees and hedges, looking like the map
of the United States, and villages, and a tower that did not look very
far away standing by itself on the top of a hill. Alice pointed to it,
and said--

‘What’s that?’

‘It’s not a church,’ said Noel, ‘because there’s no churchyard. Perhaps
it’s a tower of mystery that covers the entrance to a subterranean vault
with treasure in it.’

Dicky said, ‘Subterranean fiddlestick!’ and ‘A waterworks, more likely.’

Alice thought perhaps it was a ruined castle, and the rest of its
crumbling walls were concealed by ivy, the growth of years.

Oswald could not make his mind up what it was, so he said, ‘Let’s go and
see! We may as well go there as anywhere.’

So we got down out of the church tower and dusted ourselves, and set
out.

The Tower of Mystery showed quite plainly from the road, now that we
knew where to look for it, because it was on the top of a hill. We began
to walk. But the tower did not seem to get any nearer. And it was very
hot.

So we sat down in a meadow where there was a stream in the ditch and ate
the ‘snack’. We drank the pure water from the brook out of our hands,
because there was no farm to get milk at just there, and it was too much
fag to look for one--and, besides, we thought we might as well save the
sixpence.

Then we started again, and still the tower looked as far off as ever.
Denny began to drag his feet, though he had brought a walking-stick
which none of the rest of us had, and said--

‘I wish a cart would come along. We might get a lift.’

He knew all about getting lifts, of course, from having been in the
country before. He is not quite the white mouse we took him for at
first. Of course when you live in Lewisham or Blackheath you learn other
things. If you asked for a lift in Lewisham, High Street, your only
reply would be jeers. We sat down on a heap of stones, and decided that
we would ask for a lift from the next cart, whichever way it was going.
It was while we were waiting that Oswald found out about plantain seeds
being good to eat.

When the sound of wheels came we remarked with joy that the cart was
going towards the Tower of Mystery. It was a cart a man was going to
fetch a pig home in. Denny said--

‘I say, you might give us a lift. Will you?’

The man who was going for the pig said--

‘What, all that little lot?’ but he winked at Alice, and we saw that
he meant to aid us on our way. So we climbed up, and he whipped up the
horse and asked us where we were going. He was a kindly old man, with
a face like a walnut shell, and white hair and beard like a
jack-in-the-box.

‘We want to get to the tower,’ Alice said. ‘Is it a ruin, or not?’

‘It ain’t no ruin,’ the man said; ‘no fear of that! The man wot built it
he left so much a year to be spent on repairing of it! Money that might
have put bread in honest folks’ mouths.’

We asked was it a church then, or not.

‘Church?’ he said. ‘Not it. It’s more of a tombstone, from all I can
make out. They do say there was a curse on him that built it, and he
wasn’t to rest in earth or sea. So he’s buried half-way up the tower--if
you can call it buried.’

‘Can you go up it?’ Oswald asked.

‘Lord love you! yes; a fine view from the top they say. I’ve never
been up myself, though I’ve lived in sight of it, boy and man, these
sixty-three years come harvest.’

Alice asked whether you had to go past the dead and buried person to get
to the top of the tower, and could you see the coffin.

‘No, no,’ the man said; ‘that’s all hid away behind a slab of stone,
that is, with reading on it. You’ve no call to be afraid, missy. It’s
daylight all the way up. But I wouldn’t go there after dark, so I
wouldn’t. It’s always open, day and night, and they say tramps sleep
there now and again. Anyone who likes can sleep there, but it wouldn’t
be me.’

We thought that it would not be us either, but we wanted to go more than
ever, especially when the man said--

‘My own great-uncle of the mother’s side, he was one of the masons that
set up the stone slab. Before then it was thick glass, and you could
see the dead man lying inside, as he’d left it in his will. He was lying
there in a glass coffin with his best clothes--blue satin and silver, my
uncle said, such as was all the go in his day, with his wig on, and his
sword beside him, what he used to wear. My uncle said his hair had grown
out from under his wig, and his beard was down to the toes of him. My
uncle he always upheld that that dead man was no deader than you and me,
but was in a sort of fit, a transit, I think they call it, and looked
for him to waken into life again some day. But the doctor said not. It
was only something done to him like Pharaoh in the Bible afore he was
buried.’

Alice whispered to Oswald that we should be late for tea, and wouldn’t
it be better to go back now directly. But he said--

‘If you’re afraid, say so; and you needn’t come in anyway--but I’m going
on.’

The man who was going for the pig put us down at a gate quite near the
tower--at least it looked so until we began to walk again. We thanked
him, and he said--

‘Quite welcome,’ and drove off.

We were rather quiet going through the wood. What we had heard made us
very anxious to see the tower--all except Alice, who would keep talking
about tea, though not a greedy girl by nature. None of the others
encouraged her, but Oswald thought himself that we had better be home
before dark.

As we went up the path through the wood we saw a poor wayfarer with
dusty bare feet sitting on the bank.

He stopped us and said he was a sailor, and asked for a trifle to help
him to get back to his ship.

I did not like the look of him much myself, but Alice said, ‘Oh, the
poor man, do let’s help him, Oswald.’ So we held a hurried council, and
decided to give him the milk sixpence. Oswald had it in his purse, and
he had to empty the purse into his hand to find the sixpence, for that
was not all the money he had, by any means. Noel said afterwards that
he saw the wayfarer’s eyes fastened greedily upon the shining pieces as
Oswald returned them to his purse. Oswald has to own that he purposely
let the man see that he had more money, so that the man might not feel
shy about accepting so large a sum as sixpence.

The man blessed our kind hearts and we went on.

The sun was shining very brightly, and the Tower of Mystery did not look
at all like a tomb when we got to it. The bottom Storey was on arches,
all open, and ferns and things grew underneath. There was a round stone
stair going up in the middle. Alice began to gather ferns while we went
up, but when we had called out to her that it was as the pig-man had
said, and daylight all the way up, she said--

‘All right. I’m not afraid. I’m only afraid of being late home,’ and
came up after us. And perhaps, though not downright manly truthfulness,
this was as much as you could expect from a girl.

There were holes in the little tower of the staircase to let light in.
At the top of it was a thick door with iron bolts. We shot these back,
and it was not fear but caution that made Oswald push open the door so
very slowly and carefully.

Because, of course, a stray dog or cat might have got shut up there by
accident, and it would have startled Alice very much if it had jumped
out on us.

When the door was opened we saw that there was no such thing. It was a
room with eight sides. Denny says it is the shape called octogenarian;
because a man named Octagius invented it. There were eight large arched
windows with no glass, only stone-work, like in churches. The room was
full of sunshine, and you could see the blue sky through the windows,
but nothing else, because they were so high up. It was so bright we
began to think the pig-man had been kidding us. Under one of the windows
was a door. We went through, and there was a little passage and then a
turret-twisting stair, like in the church, but quite light with windows.
When we had gone some way up this, we came to a sort of landing, and
there was a block of stone let into the wall--polished--Denny said it
was Aberdeen graphite, with gold letters cut in it. It said--

     ‘Here lies the body of Mr Richard Ravenal
     Born 1720.  Died 1779.’

and a verse of poetry:

     ‘Here lie I, between earth and sky,
     Think upon me, dear passers-by,
     And you who do my tombstone see
     Be kind to say a prayer for me.’

‘How horrid!’ Alice said. ‘Do let’s get home.’

‘We may as well go to the top,’ Dicky said, ‘just to say we’ve been.’

And Alice is no funk--so she agreed; though I could see she did not like
it.

Up at the top it was like the top of the church tower, only octogenarian
in shape, instead of square.

Alice got all right there; because you cannot think much about ghosts
and nonsense when the sun is shining bang down on you at four o’clock in
the afternoon, and you can see red farm-roofs between the trees, and the
safe white roads, with people in carts like black ants crawling.

It was very jolly, but we felt we ought to be getting back, because tea
is at five, and we could not hope to find lifts both ways.

So we started to go down. Dicky went first, then Oswald, then Alice--and
H. O. had just stumbled over the top step and saved himself by Alice’s
back, which nearly upset Oswald and Dicky, when the hearts of all stood
still, and then went on by leaps and bounds, like the good work in
missionary magazines.

For, down below us, in the tower where the man whose beard grew down to
his toes after he was dead was buried, there was a noise--a loud noise.
And it was like a door being banged and bolts fastened. We tumbled over
each other to get back into the open sunshine on the top of the tower,
and Alice’s hand got jammed between the edge of the doorway and H. O.’s
boot; it was bruised black and blue, and another part bled, but she did
not notice it till long after.

We looked at each other, and Oswald said in a firm voice (at least, I
hope it was)--

‘What was that?’

‘He HAS waked up,’ Alice said. ‘Oh, I know he has. Of course there is a
door for him to get out by when he wakes. He’ll come up here. I know he
will.’

Dicky said, and his voice was not at all firm (I noticed that at the
time), ‘It doesn’t matter, if he’s ALIVE.’

‘Unless he’s come to life a raving lunatic,’ Noel said, and we all stood
with our eyes on the doorway of the turret--and held our breath to hear.

But there was no more noise.

Then Oswald said--and nobody ever put it in the Golden Deed book, though
they own that it was brave and noble of him--he said--

‘Perhaps it was only the wind blowing one of the doors to. I’ll go down
and see, if you will, Dick.’

Dicky only said--

‘The wind doesn’t shoot bolts.’

‘A bolt from the blue,’ said Denny to himself, looking up at the sky.
His father is a sub-editor. He had gone very red, and he was holding on
to Alice’s hand. Suddenly he stood up quite straight and said--

‘I’m not afraid. I’ll go and see.’

THIS was afterwards put in the Golden Deed book. It ended in Oswald
and Dicky and Denny going. Denny went first because he said he would
rather--and Oswald understood this and let him. If Oswald had pushed
first it would have been like Sir Lancelot refusing to let a young
knight win his spurs. Oswald took good care to go second himself,
though. The others never understood this. You don’t expect it from
girls; but I did think father would have understood without Oswald
telling him, which of course he never could.

We all went slowly.

At the bottom of the turret stairs we stopped short. Because the door
there was bolted fast and would not yield to shoves, however desperate
and united.

Only now somehow we felt that Mr Richard Ravenal was all right and
quiet, but that some one had done it for a lark, or perhaps not known
about anyone being up there. So we rushed up, and Oswald told the others
in a few hasty but well-chosen words, and we all leaned over between the
battlements, and shouted, ‘Hi! you there!’

Then from under the arches of the quite-downstairs part of the tower a
figure came forth--and it was the sailor who had had our milk sixpence.
He looked up and he spoke to us. He did not speak loud, but he spoke
loud enough for us to hear every word quite plainly. He said--

‘Drop that.’

Oswald said, ‘Drop what?’

He said, ‘That row.’

Oswald said, ‘Why?’

He said, ‘Because if you don’t I’ll come up and make you, and pretty
quick too, so I tell you.’

Dicky said, ‘Did you bolt the door?’

The man said, ‘I did so, my young cock.’

Alice said--and Oswald wished to goodness she had held her tongue,
because he saw right enough the man was not friendly--‘Oh, do come and
let us out--do, please.’

While she was saying it Oswald suddenly saw that he did not want the
man to come up. So he scurried down the stairs because he thought he had
seen something on the door on the top side, and sure enough there were
two bolts, and he shot them into their sockets. This bold act was not
put in the Golden Deed book, because when Alice wanted to, the others
said it was not GOOD of Oswald to think of this, but only CLEVER. I
think sometimes, in moments of danger and disaster, it is as good to
be clever as it is to be good. But Oswald would never demean himself to
argue about this.

When he got back the man was still standing staring up. Alice said--

‘Oh, Oswald, he says he won’t let us out unless we give him all our
money. And we might be here for days and days and all night as well. No
one knows where we are to come and look for us. Oh, do let’s give it him
ALL.’

She thought the lion of the English nation, which does not know when
it is beaten, would be ramping in her brother’s breast. But Oswald kept
calm. He said--

‘All right,’ and he made the others turn out their pockets. Denny had a
bad shilling, with a head on both sides, and three halfpence. H. O. had
a halfpenny. Noel had a French penny, which is only good for chocolate
machines at railway stations. Dicky had tenpence-halfpenny, and Oswald
had a two-shilling piece of his own that he was saving up to buy a gun
with. Oswald tied the whole lot up in his handkerchief, and looking over
the battlements, he said--

‘You are an ungrateful beast. We gave you sixpence freely of our own
will.’

The man did look a little bit ashamed, but he mumbled something about
having his living to get. Then Oswald said--

‘Here you are. Catch!’ and he flung down the handkerchief with the money
in it.

The man muffed the catch--butter-fingered idiot!--but he picked up
the handkerchief and undid it, and when he saw what was in it he swore
dreadfully. The cad!

‘Look here,’ he called out, ‘this won’t do, young shaver. I want those
there shiners I see in your pus! Chuck ‘em along!’

Then Oswald laughed. He said--

‘I shall know you again anywhere, and you’ll be put in prison for this.
Here are the SHINERS.’ And he was so angry he chucked down purse and
all. The shiners were not real ones, but only card-counters that looked
like sovereigns on one side. Oswald used to carry them in his purse so
as to look affluent. He does not do this now.

When the man had seen what was in the purse he disappeared under the
tower, and Oswald was glad of what he had done about the bolts--and he
hoped they were as strong as the ones on the other side of the door.

They were.

We heard the man kicking and pounding at the door, and I am not ashamed
to say that we were all holding on to each other very tight. I am proud,
however, to relate that nobody screamed or cried.

After what appeared to be long years, the banging stopped, and presently
we saw the brute going away among the trees. Then Alice did cry, and I
do not blame her. Then Oswald said--

‘It’s no use. Even if he’s undone the door, he may be in ambush. We must
hold on here till somebody comes.’

Then Alice said, speaking chokily because she had not quite done
crying--

‘Let’s wave a flag.’

By the most fortunate accident she had on one of her Sunday petticoats,
though it was Monday. This petticoat is white. She tore it out at the
gathers, and we tied it to Denny’s stick, and took turns to wave it. We
had laughed at his carrying a stick before, but we were very sorry now
that we had done so.

And the tin dish the Lent pie was baked in we polished with our
handkerchiefs, and moved it about in the sun so that the sun might
strike on it and signal our distress to some of the outlying farms.

This was perhaps the most dreadful adventure that had then ever happened
to us. Even Alice had now stopped thinking of Mr Richard Ravenal, and
thought only of the lurker in ambush.

We all felt our desperate situation keenly. I must say Denny behaved
like anything but a white mouse. When it was the others’ turn to wave,
he sat on the leads of the tower and held Alice’s and Noel’s hands, and
said poetry to them--yards and yards of it. By some strange fatality it
seemed to comfort them. It wouldn’t have me.

He said ‘The Battle of the Baltic’, and ‘Gray’s Elegy’, right through,
though I think he got wrong in places, and the ‘Revenge’, and Macaulay’s
thing about Lars Porsena and the Nine Gods. And when it was his turn he
waved like a man.

I will try not to call him a white mouse any more. He was a brick that
day, and no mouse.

The sun was low in the heavens, and we were sick of waving and very
hungry, when we saw a cart in the road below. We waved like mad, and
shouted, and Denny screamed exactly like a railway whistle, a thing none
of us had known before that he could do.

And the cart stopped. And presently we saw a figure with a white beard
among the trees. It was our Pig-man.

We bellowed the awful truth to him, and when he had taken it in--he
thought at first we were kidding--he came up and let us out.

He had got the pig; luckily it was a very small one--and we were not
particular. Denny and Alice sat on the front of the cart with the
Pig-man, and the rest of us got in with the pig, and the man drove us
right home. You may think we talked it over on the way. Not us. We went
to sleep, among the pig, and before long the Pig-man stopped and got us
to make room for Alice and Denny. There was a net over the cart. I never
was so sleepy in my life, though it was not more than bedtime.


Generally, after anything exciting, you are punished--but this could not
be, because we had only gone for a walk, exactly as we were told.

There was a new rule made, though. No walks except on the high-roads,
and we were always to take Pincher and either Lady, the deer-hound, or
Martha, the bulldog. We generally hate rules, but we did not mind this
one.

Father gave Denny a gold pencil-case because he was first to go down
into the tower. Oswald does not grudge Denny this, though some might
think he deserved at least a silver one. But Oswald is above such paltry
jealousies.



CHAPTER 5. THE WATERWORKS

This is the story of one of the most far-reaching and influentially
naughty things we ever did in our lives. We did not mean to do such
a deed. And yet we did do it. These things will happen with the
best-regulated consciences.

The story of this rash and fatal act is intimately involved--which means
all mixed up anyhow--with a private affair of Oswald’s, and the one
cannot be revealed without the other. Oswald does not particularly want
his story to be remembered, but he wishes to tell the truth, and perhaps
it is what father calls a wholesome discipline to lay bare the awful
facts.

It was like this.

On Alice’s and Noel’s birthday we went on the river for a picnic. Before
that we had not known that there was a river so near us. Afterwards
father said he wished we had been allowed to remain on our pristine
ignorance, whatever that is. And perhaps the dark hour did dawn when we
wished so too. But a truce to vain regrets.

It was rather a fine thing in birthdays. The uncle sent a box of toys
and sweets, things that were like a vision from another and a brighter
world. Besides that Alice had a knife, a pair of shut-up scissors, a
silk handkerchief, a book--it was The Golden Age and is A1 except where
it gets mixed with grown-up nonsense. Also a work-case lined with pink
plush, a boot-bag, which no one in their senses would use because it
had flowers in wool all over it. And she had a box of chocolates and a
musical box that played ‘The Man who broke’ and two other tunes, and two
pairs of kid gloves for church, and a box of writing-paper--pink--with
‘Alice’ on it in gold writing, and an egg coloured red that said ‘A.
Bastable’ in ink on one side. These gifts were the offerings of Oswald,
Dora, Dicky, Albert’s uncle, Daisy, Mr Foulkes (our own robber), Noel,
H. O., father and Denny. Mrs Pettigrew gave the egg. It was a kindly
housekeeper’s friendly token.

I shall not tell you about the picnic on the river because the happiest
times form but dull reading when they are written down. I will merely
state that it was prime. Though happy, the day was uneventful. The only
thing exciting enough to write about was in one of the locks, where
there was a snake--a viper. It was asleep in a warm sunny corner of the
lock gate, and when the gate was shut it fell off into the water.

Alice and Dora screamed hideously. So did Daisy, but her screams were
thinner.

The snake swam round and round all the time our boat was in the lock.
It swam with four inches of itself--the head end--reared up out of the
water, exactly like Kaa in the Jungle Book--so we know Kipling is a true
author and no rotter. We were careful to keep our hands well inside the
boat. A snake’s eyes strike terror into the boldest breast.

When the lock was full father killed the viper with a boat-hook. I was
sorry for it myself. It was indeed a venomous serpent. But it was the
first we had ever seen, except at the Zoo. And it did swim most awfully
well.

Directly the snake had been killed H. O. reached out for its corpse,
and the next moment the body of our little brother was seen wriggling
conclusively on the boat’s edge. This exciting spectacle was not of
a lasting nature. He went right in. Father clawed him out. He is very
unlucky with water.

Being a birthday, but little was said. H. O. was wrapped in everybody’s
coats, and did not take any cold at all.

This glorious birthday ended with an iced cake and ginger wine, and
drinking healths. Then we played whatever we liked. There had been
rounders during the afternoon. It was a day to be for ever marked by
memory’s brightest what’s-its-name.

I should not have said anything about the picnic but for one thing. It
was the thin edge of the wedge. It was the all-powerful lever that moved
but too many events. You see, WE WERE NO LONGER STRANGERS TO THE RIVER.

And we went there whenever we could. Only we had to take the dogs, and
to promise no bathing without grown-ups. But paddling in back waters was
allowed. I say no more.

I have not numerated Noel’s birthday presents because I wish to leave
something to the imagination of my young readers. (The best authors
always do this.) If you will take the large, red catalogue of the Army
and Navy Stores, and just make a list of about fifteen of the things you
would like best--prices from 2s. to 25s.--you will get a very good idea
of Noel’s presents, and it will help you to make up your mind in case
you are asked just before your next birthday what you really NEED.

One of Noel’s birthday presents was a cricket ball. He cannot bowl for
nuts, and it was a first-rate ball. So some days after the birthday
Oswald offered him to exchange it for a coconut he had won at the fair,
and two pencils (new), and a brand-new note-book. Oswald thought, and
he still thinks, that this was a fair exchange, and so did Noel at the
time, and he agreed to it, and was quite pleased till the girls said it
wasn’t fair, and Oswald had the best of it. And then that young beggar
Noel wanted the ball back, but Oswald, though not angry, was firm.

‘You said it was a bargain, and you shook hands on it,’ he said, and he
said it quite kindly and calmly.

Noel said he didn’t care. He wanted his cricket ball back. And the girls
said it was a horrid shame.

If they had not said that, Oswald might yet have consented to let Noel
have the beastly ball, but now, of course, he was not going to. He
said--

‘Oh, yes, I daresay. And then you would be wanting the coconut and
things again the next minute.’

‘No, I shouldn’t,’ Noel said. It turned out afterwards he and H. O.
had eaten the coconut, which only made it worse. And it made them worse
too--which is what the book calls poetic justice.

Dora said, ‘I don’t think it was fair,’ and even Alice said--

‘Do let him have it back, Oswald.’

I wish to be just to Alice. She did not know then about the coconut
having been secretly wolfed up.

We were in the garden. Oswald felt all the feelings of the hero when
the opposing forces gathered about him are opposing as hard as ever they
can. He knew he was not unfair, and he did not like to be jawed at just
because Noel had eaten the coconut and wanted the ball back. Though
Oswald did not know then about the eating of the coconut, but he felt
the injustice in his soul all the same.

Noel said afterwards he meant to offer Oswald something else to make up
for the coconut, but he said nothing about this at the time.

‘Give it me, I say,’ Noel said.

And Oswald said, ‘Shan’t!’

Then Noel called Oswald names, and Oswald did not answer back but
just kept smiling pleasantly, and carelessly throwing up the ball and
catching it again with an air of studied indifference.

It was Martha’s fault that what happened happened. She is the bull-dog,
and very stout and heavy. She had just been let loose and she came
bounding along in her clumsy way, and jumped up on Oswald, who is
beloved by all dumb animals. (You know how sagacious they are.) Well,
Martha knocked the ball out of Oswald’s hands, and it fell on the grass,
and Noel pounced on it like a hooded falcon on its prey. Oswald would
scorn to deny that he was not going to stand this, and the next moment
the two were rolling over on the grass, and very soon Noel was made to
bite the dust. And serve him right. He is old enough to know his own
mind.

Then Oswald walked slowly away with the ball, and the others picked Noel
up, and consoled the beaten, but Dicky would not take either side.

And Oswald went up into his own room and lay on his bed, and reflected
gloomy reflections about unfairness.

Presently he thought he would like to see what the others were doing
without their knowing he cared. So he went into the linen-room and
looked out of its window, and he saw they were playing Kings and
Queens--and Noel had the biggest paper crown and the longest stick
sceptre.

Oswald turned away without a word, for it really was sickening.

Then suddenly his weary eyes fell upon something they had not before
beheld. It was a square trap-door in the ceiling of the linen-room.

Oswald never hesitated. He crammed the cricket ball into his pocket and
climbed up the shelves and unbolted the trap-door, and shoved it up,
and pulled himself up through it. Though above all was dark and smelt
of spiders, Oswald fearlessly shut the trap-door down again before he
struck a match. He always carries matches. He is a boy fertile in every
subtle expedient. Then he saw he was in the wonderful, mysterious place
between the ceiling and the roof of the house. The roof is beams
and tiles. Slits of light show through the tiles here and there. The
ceiling, on its other and top side, is made of rough plaster and beams.
If you walk on the beams it is all right--if you walk on the plaster you
go through with your feet. Oswald found this out later, but some fine
instinct now taught the young explorer where he ought to tread and where
not. It was splendid. He was still very angry with the others and he was
glad he had found out a secret they jolly well didn’t know.

He walked along a dark, narrow passage. Every now and then cross-beams
barred his way, and he had to creep under them. At last a small door
loomed before him with cracks of light under and over. He drew back the
rusty bolts and opened it. It opened straight on to the leads, a flat
place between two steep red roofs, with a parapet two feet high back and
front, so that no one could see you. It was a place no one could have
invented better than, if they had tried, for hiding in.

Oswald spent the whole afternoon there. He happened to have a volume of
Percy’s Anecdotes in his pocket, the one about lawyers, as well as a
few apples. While he read he fingered the cricket ball, and presently it
rolled away, and he thought he would get it by-and-by.

When the tea-bell rang he forgot the ball and went hurriedly down, for
apples do not keep the inside from the pangs of hunger.

Noel met him on the landing, got red in the face, and said--

‘It wasn’t QUITE fair about the ball, because H. O. and I had eaten the
coconut. YOU can have it.’

‘I don’t want your beastly ball,’ Oswald said, ‘only I hate unfairness.
However, I don’t know where it is just now. When I find it you shall
have it to bowl with as often as you want.’

‘Then you’re not waxy?’

And Oswald said ‘No’ and they went in to tea together. So that was all
right. There were raisin cakes for tea.

Next day we happened to want to go down to the river quite early. I
don’t know why; this is called Fate, or Destiny. We dropped in at the
‘Rose and Crown’ for some ginger-beer on our way. The landlady is a
friend of ours and lets us drink it in her back parlour, instead of in
the bar, which would be improper for girls.

We found her awfully busy, making pies and jellies, and her two sisters
were hurrying about with great hams, and pairs of chickens, and rounds
of cold beef and lettuces, and pickled salmon and trays of crockery and
glasses.

‘It’s for the angling competition,’ she said.

We said, ‘What’s that?’

‘Why,’ she said, slicing cucumber like beautiful machinery while she
said it, ‘a lot of anglers come down some particular day and fish one
particular bit of the river. And the one that catches most fish gets the
prize. They’re fishing the pen above Stoneham Lock. And they all come
here to dinner. So I’ve got my hands full and a trifle over.’

We said, ‘Couldn’t we help?’

But she said, ‘Oh, no, thank you. Indeed not, please. I really am so I
don’t know which way to turn. Do run along, like dears.’

So we ran along like these timid but graceful animals.

Need I tell the intellectual reader that we went straight off to the pen
above Stoneham Lock to see the anglers competing? Angling is the same
thing as fishing.

I am not going to try and explain locks to you. If you’ve never seen
a lock you could never understand even if I wrote it in words of one
syllable and pages and pages long. And if you have, you’ll understand
without my telling you. It is harder than Euclid if you don’t know
beforehand. But you might get a grown-up person to explain it to you
with books or wooden bricks.

I will tell you what a pen is because that is easy. It is the bit of
river between one lock and the next. In some rivers ‘pens’ are called
‘reaches’, but pen is the proper word.

We went along the towing-path; it is shady with willows, aspens,
alders, elders, oaks and other trees. On the banks are flowers--yarrow,
meadow-sweet, willow herb, loosestrife, and lady’s bed-straw. Oswald
learned the names of all these trees and plants on the day of the
picnic. The others didn’t remember them, but Oswald did. He is a boy of
what they call relenting memory.

The anglers were sitting here and there on the shady bank among the
grass and the different flowers I have named. Some had dogs with them,
and some umbrellas, and some had only their wives and families.

We should have liked to talk to them and ask how they liked their lot,
and what kinds of fish there were, and whether they were nice to eat,
but we did not like to.

Denny had seen anglers before and he knew they liked to be talked to,
but though he spoke to them quite like to equals he did not ask the
things we wanted to know. He just asked whether they’d had any luck, and
what bait they used.

And they answered him back politely. I am glad I am not an angler.

It is an immovable amusement, and, as often as not, no fish to speak of
after all.

Daisy and Dora had stayed at home: Dora’s foot was nearly well but they
seem really to like sitting still. I think Dora likes to have a little
girl to order about. Alice never would stand it. When we got to Stoneham
Lock Denny said he should go home and fetch his fishing-rod. H. O. went
with him. This left four of us--Oswald, Alice, Dicky, and Noel. We went
on down the towing-path. The lock shuts up (that sounds as if it was
like the lock on a door, but it is very otherwise) between one pen of
the river and the next; the pen where the anglers were was full right
up over the roots of the grass and flowers. But the pen below was nearly
empty.

‘You can see the poor river’s bones,’ Noel said.

And so you could.

Stones and mud and dried branches, and here and there an old kettle or a
tin pail with no bottom to it, that some bargee had chucked in.

From walking so much along the river we knew many of the bargees.
Bargees are the captains and crews of the big barges that are pulled up
and down the river by slow horses. The horses do not swim. They walk
on the towing-path, with a rope tied to them, and the other end to the
barge. So it gets pulled along. The bargees we knew were a good friendly
sort, and used to let us go all over the barges when they were in a good
temper. They were not at all the sort of bullying, cowardly fiends
in human form that the young hero at Oxford fights a crowd of,
single-handed, in books.

The river does not smell nice when its bones are showing. But we went
along down, because Oswald wanted to get some cobbler’s wax in Falding
village for a bird-net he was making.

But just above Falding Lock, where the river is narrow and straight, we
saw a sad and gloomy sight--a big barge sitting flat on the mud because
there was not water enough to float her.

There was no one on board, but we knew by a red flannel waistcoat that
was spread out to dry on top that the barge belonged to friends of ours.

Then Alice said, ‘They have gone to find the man who turns on the water
to fill the pen. I daresay they won’t find him. He’s gone to his dinner,
I shouldn’t wonder. What a lovely surprise it would be if they came back
to find their barge floating high and dry on a lot of water! DO let’s
do it. It’s a long time since any of us did a kind action deserving of
being put in the Book of Golden Deeds.’

We had given that name to the minute-book of that beastly ‘Society of
the Wouldbegoods’. Then you could think of the book if you wanted to
without remembering the Society. I always tried to forget both of them.

Oswald said, ‘But how? YOU don’t know how. And if you did we haven’t got
a crowbar.’

I cannot help telling you that locks are opened with crowbars. You push
and push till a thing goes up and the water runs through. It is rather
like the little sliding door in the big door of a hen-house.

‘I know where the crowbar is,’ Alice said. ‘Dicky and I were down here
yesterday when you were su--’ She was going to say sulking, I know, but
she remembered manners ere too late so Oswald bears her no malice. She
went on: ‘Yesterday, when you were upstairs. And we saw the water-tender
open the lock and the weir sluices. It’s quite easy, isn’t it, Dicky?’

‘As easy as kiss your hand,’ said Dicky; ‘and what’s more, I know where
he keeps the other thing he opens the sluices with. I votes we do.’

‘Do let’s, if we can,’ Noel said, ‘and the bargees will bless the names
of their unknown benefactors. They might make a song about us, and sing
it on winter nights as they pass round the wassail bowl in front of the
cabin fire.’

Noel wanted to very much; but I don’t think it was altogether for
generousness, but because he wanted to see how the sluices opened. Yet
perhaps I do but wrong the boy.

We sat and looked at the barge a bit longer, and then Oswald said, well,
he didn’t mind going back to the lock and having a look at the crowbars.
You see Oswald did not propose this; he did not even care very much
about it when Alice suggested it.

But when we got to Stoneham Lock, and Dicky dragged the two heavy
crowbars from among the elder bushes behind a fallen tree, and began to
pound away at the sluice of the lock, Oswald felt it would not be manly
to stand idly apart. So he took his turn.

It was very hard work but we opened the lock sluices, and we did not
drop the crowbar into the lock either, as I have heard of being done by
older and sillier people.

The water poured through the sluices all green and solid, as if it had
been cut with a knife, and where it fell on the water underneath the
white foam spread like a moving counterpane. When we had finished the
lock we did the weir--which is wheels and chains--and the water pours
through over the stones in a magnificent waterfall and sweeps out all
round the weir-pool.

The sight of the foaming waterfalls was quite enough reward for our
heavy labours, even without the thought of the unspeakable gratitude
that the bargees would feel to us when they got back to their barge and
found her no longer a stick-in-the-mud, but bounding on the free bosom
of the river.

When we had opened all the sluices we gazed awhile on the beauties of
Nature, and then went home, because we thought it would be more truly
noble and good not to wait to be thanked for our kind and devoted
action--and besides, it was nearly dinner-time and Oswald thought it was
going to rain.

On the way home we agreed not to tell the others, because it would be
like boasting of our good acts.

‘They will know all about it,’ Noel said, ‘when they hear us being
blessed by the grateful bargees, and the tale of the Unknown Helpers is
being told by every village fireside. And then they can write it in the
Golden Deed book.’

So we went home. Denny and H. O. had thought better of it, and they were
fishing in the moat. They did not catch anything.

Oswald is very weather-wise--at least, so I have heard it said, and he
had thought there would be rain. There was. It came on while we were
at dinner--a great, strong, thundering rain, coming down in sheets--the
first rain we had had since we came to the Moat House.

We went to bed as usual. No presentiment of the coming awfulness clouded
our young mirth. I remember Dicky and Oswald had a wrestling match, and
Oswald won.

In the middle of the night Oswald was awakened by a hand on his face.
It was a wet hand and very cold. Oswald hit out, of course, but a voice
said, in a hoarse, hollow whisper--

‘Don’t be a young ass! Have you got any matches? My bed’s full of water;
it’s pouring down from the ceiling.’

Oswald’s first thoughts was that perhaps by opening those sluices we
had flooded some secret passage which communicated with the top of Moat
House, but when he was properly awake he saw that this could not be, on
account of the river being so low.

He had matches. He is, as I said before, a boy full of resources. He
struck one and lit a candle, and Dicky, for it was indeed he, gazed with
Oswald at the amazing spectacle.

Our bedroom floor was all wet in patches. Dicky’s bed stood in a pond,
and from the ceiling water was dripping in rich profusion at a dozen
different places. There was a great wet patch in the ceiling, and that
was blue, instead of white like the dry part, and the water dripped from
different parts of it.

In a moment Oswald was quite unmanned.

‘Krikey!’ he said, in a heart-broken tone, and remained an instant
plunged in thought.

‘What on earth are we to do?’ Dicky said.

And really for a short time even Oswald did not know. It was a
blood-curdling event, a regular facer. Albert’s uncle had gone to London
that day to stay till the next. Yet something must be done.

The first thing was to rouse the unconscious others from their deep
sleep, because the water was beginning to drip on to their beds, and
though as yet they knew it not, there was quite a pool on Noel’s bed,
just in the hollow behind where his knees were doubled up, and one of
H. O.’s boots was full of water, that surged wildly out when Oswald
happened to kick it over.

We woke them--a difficult task, but we did not shrink from it.


Then we said, ‘Get up, there is a flood! Wake up, or you will be drowned
in your beds! And it’s half past two by Oswald’s watch.’

They awoke slowly and very stupidly. H. O. was the slowest and
stupidest.


The water poured faster and faster from the ceiling.

We looked at each other and turned pale, and Noel said--

‘Hadn’t we better call Mrs Pettigrew?’

But Oswald simply couldn’t consent to this. He could not get rid of the
feeling that this was our fault somehow for meddling with the river,
though of course the clear star of reason told him it could not possibly
be the case.

We all devoted ourselves, heart and soul, to the work before us. We
put the bath under the worst and wettest place, and the jugs and basins
under lesser streams, and we moved the beds away to the dry end of the
room. Ours is a long attic that runs right across the house.

But the water kept coming in worse and worse. Our nightshirts were
wet through, so we got into our other shirts and knickerbockers, but
preserved bareness in our feet. And the floor kept on being half an inch
deep in water, however much we mopped it up.

We emptied the basins out of the window as fast as they filled, and we
baled the bath with a jug without pausing to complain how hard the
work was. All the same, it was more exciting than you can think. But in
Oswald’s dauntless breast he began to see that they would HAVE to call
Mrs Pettigrew.

A new waterfall broke out between the fire-grate and the mantelpiece,
and spread in devastating floods. Oswald is full of ingenious devices.
I think I have said this before, but it is quite true; and perhaps even
truer this time than it was last time I said it.

He got a board out of the box-room next door, and rested one end in the
chink between the fireplace and the mantelpiece, and laid the other end
on the back of a chair, then we stuffed the rest of the chink with our
nightgowns, and laid a towel along the plank, and behold, a noble stream
poured over the end of the board right into the bath we put there ready.
It was like Niagara, only not so round in shape. The first lot of water
that came down the chimney was very dirty. The wind whistled outside.
Noel said, ‘If it’s pipes burst, and not the rain, it will be nice for
the water-rates.’ Perhaps it was only natural after this for Denny to
begin with his everlasting poetry. He stopped mopping up the water to
say:

     ‘By this the storm grew loud apace,
     The water-rats were shrieking,
     And in the howl of Heaven each face
     Grew black as they were speaking.’

Our faces were black, and our hands too, but we did not take any notice;
we only told him not to gas but to go on mopping. And he did. And we all
did.

But more and more water came pouring down. You would not believe so much
could come off one roof.

When at last it was agreed that Mrs Pettigrew must be awakened at all
hazards, we went and woke Alice to do the fatal errand.

When she came back, with Mrs Pettigrew in a nightcap and red flannel
petticoat, we held our breath.

But Mrs Pettigrew did not even say, ‘What on earth have you children
been up to NOW?’ as Oswald had feared.

She simply sat down on my bed and said--

‘Oh, dear! oh, dear! oh, dear!’ ever so many times.

Then Denny said, ‘I once saw holes in a cottage roof. The man told me
it was done when the water came through the thatch. He said if the water
lies all about on the top of the ceiling, it breaks it down, but if you
make holes the water will only come through the holes and you can put
pails under the holes to catch it.’

So we made nine holes in the ceiling with the poker, and put pails,
baths and tubs under, and now there was not so much water on the floor.
But we had to keep on working like niggers, and Mrs Pettigrew and Alice
worked the same.

About five in the morning the rain stopped; about seven the water did
not come in so fast, and presently it only dripped slowly. Our task was
done.

This is the only time I was ever up all night. I wish it happened
oftener. We did not go back to bed then, but dressed and went down. We
all went to sleep in the afternoon, though. Quite without meaning to.

Oswald went up on the roof, before breakfast, to see if he could find
the hole where the rain had come in. He did not find any hole, but
he found the cricket ball jammed in the top of a gutter pipe which he
afterwards knew ran down inside the wall of the house and ran into the
moat below. It seems a silly dodge, but so it was.

When the men went up after breakfast to see what had caused the flood
they said there must have been a good half-foot of water on the leads
the night before for it to have risen high enough to go above the edge
of the lead, and of course when it got above the lead there was nothing
to stop it running down under it, and soaking through the ceiling. The
parapet and the roofs kept it from tumbling off down the sides of
the house in the natural way. They said there must have been some
obstruction in the pipe which ran down into the house, but whatever it
was the water had washed it away, for they put wires down, and the pipe
was quite clear.

While we were being told this Oswald’s trembling fingers felt at the wet
cricket ball in his pocket. And he KNEW, but he COULD not tell. He heard
them wondering what the obstruction could have been, and all the time he
had the obstruction in his pocket, and never said a single word.

I do not seek to defend him. But it really was an awful thing to have
been the cause of; and Mrs Pettigrew is but harsh and hasty. But this,
as Oswald knows too well, is no excuse for his silent conduct.

That night at tea Albert’s uncle was rather silent too. At last he
looked upon us with a glance full of intelligence, and said--

‘There was a queer thing happened yesterday. You know there was an
angling competition. The pen was kept full on purpose. Some mischievous
busybody went and opened the sluices and let all the water out. The
anglers’ holiday was spoiled. No, the rain wouldn’t have spoiled it
anyhow, Alice; anglers LIKE rain. The ‘Rose and Crown’ dinner was half
of it wasted because the anglers were so furious that a lot of them took
the next train to town. And this is the worst of all--a barge, that was
on the mud in the pen below, was lifted and jammed across the river and
the water tilted her over, and her cargo is on the river bottom. It was
coals.’

During this speech there were four of us who knew not where to turn our
agitated glances. Some of us tried bread-and-butter, but it seemed dry
and difficult, and those who tried tea choked and spluttered and were
sorry they had not let it alone. When the speech stopped Alice said, ‘It
was us.’

And with deepest feelings she and the rest of us told all about it.

Oswald did not say much. He was turning the obstruction round and round
in his pocket, and wishing with all his sentiments that he had owned
up like a man when Albert’s uncle asked him before tea to tell him all
about what had happened during the night.

When they had told all, Albert’s uncle told us four still more plainly,
and exactly, what we had done, and how much pleasure we had spoiled, and
how much of my father’s money we had wasted--because he would have to
pay for the coals being got up from the bottom of the river, if they
could be, and if not, for the price of the coals. And we saw it ALL.

And when he had done Alice burst out crying over her plate and said--

‘It’s no use! We HAVE tried to be good since we’ve been down here.

You don’t know how we’ve tried! And it’s all no use. I believe we are
the wickedest children in the whole world, and I wish we were all dead!’

This was a dreadful thing to say, and of course the rest of us were all
very shocked. But Oswald could not help looking at Albert’s uncle to see
how he would take it.

He said very gravely, ‘My dear kiddie, you ought to be sorry, and I wish
you to be sorry for what you’ve done. And you will be punished for it.’
(We were; our pocket-money was stopped and we were forbidden to go near
the river, besides impositions miles long.) ‘But,’ he went on, ‘you
mustn’t give up trying to be good. You are extremely naughty and
tiresome, as you know very well.’

Alice, Dicky, and Noel began to cry at about this time.

‘But you are not the wickedest children in the world by any means.’

Then he stood up and straightened his collar, and put his hands in his
pockets.

‘You’re very unhappy now,’ he said, ‘and you deserve to be. But I will
say one thing to you.’

Then he said a thing which Oswald at least will never forget (though but
little he deserved it, with the obstruction in his pocket, unowned up to
all the time).

He said, ‘I have known you all for four years--and you know as well as
I do how many scrapes I’ve seen you in and out of--but I’ve never known
one of you tell a lie, and I’ve never known one of you do a mean or
dishonourable action. And when you have done wrong you are always sorry.
Now this is something to stand firm on. You’ll learn to be good in the
other ways some day.’

He took his hands out of his pockets, and his face looked different, so
that three of the four guilty creatures knew he was no longer adamant,
and they threw themselves into his arms. Dora, Denny, Daisy, and H. O.,
of course, were not in it, and I think they thanked their stars.

Oswald did not embrace Albert’s uncle. He stood there and made up his
mind he would go for a soldier. He gave the wet ball one last squeeze,
and took his hand out of his pocket, and said a few words before going
to enlist. He said--

‘The others may deserve what you say. I hope they do, I’m sure. But I
don’t, because it was my rotten cricket ball that stopped up the pipe
and caused the midnight flood in our bedroom. And I knew it quite early
this morning. And I didn’t own up.’

Oswald stood there covered with shame, and he could feel the hateful
cricket ball heavy and cold against the top of his leg, through the
pocket.

Albert’s uncle said--and his voice made Oswald hot all over, but not
with shame--he said--

I shall not tell you what he said. It is no one’s business but Oswald’s;
only I will own it made Oswald not quite so anxious to run away for a
soldier as he had been before.

That owning up was the hardest thing I ever did. They did put that in
the Book of Golden Deeds, though it was not a kind or generous act, and
did no good to anyone or anything except Oswald’s own inside feelings.
I must say I think they might have let it alone. Oswald would rather
forget it. Especially as Dicky wrote it in and put this:

‘Oswald acted a lie, which, he knows, is as bad as telling one. But he
owned up when he needn’t have, and this condones his sin. We think he
was a thorough brick to do it.’

Alice scratched this out afterwards and wrote the record of the incident
in more flattering terms. But Dicky had used Father’s ink, and she used
Mrs Pettigrew’s, so anyone can read his underneath the scratching outs.

The others were awfully friendly to Oswald, to show they agreed with
Albert’s uncle in thinking I deserved as much share as anyone in any
praise there might be going.

It was Dora who said it all came from my quarrelling with Noel about
that rotten cricket ball; but Alice, gently yet firmly, made her shut
up.

I let Noel have the ball. It had been thoroughly soaked, but it dried
all right. But it could never be the same to me after what it had done
and what I had done.

I hope you will try to agree with Albert’s uncle and not think foul
scorn of Oswald because of this story. Perhaps you have done things
nearly as bad yourself sometimes. If you have, you will know how ‘owning
up’ soothes the savage breast and alleviates the gnawings of remorse.

If you have never done naughty acts I expect it is only because you
never had the sense to think of anything.



CHAPTER 6. THE CIRCUS

The ones of us who had started the Society of the Wouldbegoods began, at
about this time, to bother.

They said we had not done anything really noble--not worth speaking
of, that is--for over a week, and that it was high time to begin
again--‘with earnest endeavour’, Daisy said. So then Oswald said--

‘All right; but there ought to be an end to everything. Let’s each of us
think of one really noble and unselfish act, and the others shall help
to work it out, like we did when we were Treasure Seekers. Then when
everybody’s had their go-in we’ll write every single thing down in the
Golden Deed book, and we’ll draw two lines in red ink at the bottom,
like Father does at the end of an account. And after that, if anyone
wants to be good they can jolly well be good on our own, if at all.’

The ones who had made the Society did not welcome this wise idea, but
Dicky and Oswald were firm.

So they had to agree. When Oswald is really firm, opposingness and
obstinacy have to give way.

Dora said, ‘It would be a noble action to have all the school-children
from the village and give them tea and games in the paddock. They would
think it so nice and good of us.’

But Dicky showed her that this would not be OUR good act, but Father’s,
because he would have to pay for the tea, and he had already stood us
the keepsakes for the soldiers, as well as having to stump up heavily
over the coal barge. And it is in vain being noble and generous when
someone else is paying for it all the time, even if it happens to be
your father. Then three others had ideas at the same time and began to
explain what they were.

We were all in the dining-room, and perhaps we were making a bit of a
row. Anyhow, Oswald for one, does not blame Albert’s uncle for opening
his door and saying--

‘I suppose I must not ask for complete silence. That were too much.
But if you could whistle, or stamp with your feet, or shriek
or howl--anything to vary the monotony of your well-sustained
conversation.’

Oswald said kindly, ‘We’re awfully sorry. Are you busy?’

‘Busy?’ said Albert’s uncle. ‘My heroine is now hesitating on the verge
of an act which, for good or ill, must influence her whole subsequent
career. You wouldn’t like her to decide in the middle of such a row that
she can’t hear herself think?’

We said, ‘No, we wouldn’t.’

Then he said, ‘If any outdoor amusement should commend itself to you
this bright mid-summer day.’ So we all went out.

Then Daisy whispered to Dora--they always hang together. Daisy is not
nearly so white-micey as she was at first, but she still seems to fear
the deadly ordeal of public speaking. Dora said--

‘Daisy’s idea is a game that’ll take us all day. She thinks keeping out
of the way when he’s making his heroine decide right would be a noble
act, and fit to write in the Golden Book; and we might as well be
playing something at the same time.’

We all said ‘Yes, but what?’

There was a silent interval.

‘Speak up, Daisy, my child.’ Oswald said; ‘fear not to lay bare the
utmost thoughts of that faithful heart.’

Daisy giggled. Our own girls never giggle--they laugh right out or hold
their tongues. Their kind brothers have taught them this. Then Daisy
said--

‘If we could have a sort of play to keep us out of the way. I once read
a story about an animal race. Everybody had an animal, and they had to
go how they liked, and the one that got in first got the prize. There
was a tortoise in it, and a rabbit, and a peacock, and sheep, and dogs,
and a kitten.’

This proposal left us cold, as Albert’s uncle says, because we knew
there could not be any prize worth bothering about. And though you may
be ever ready and willing to do anything for nothing, yet if there’s
going to be a prize there must BE a prize and there’s an end of it.

Thus the idea was not followed up. Dicky yawned and said, ‘Let’s go into
the barn and make a fort.’

So we did, with straw. It does not hurt straw to be messed about with
like it does hay.

The downstairs--I mean down-ladder--part of the barn was fun too,
especially for Pincher. There was as good ratting there as you could
wish to see. Martha tried it, but she could not help running kindly
beside the rat, as if she was in double harness with it. This is the
noble bull-dog’s gentle and affectionate nature coming out. We all
enjoyed the ratting that day, but it ended, as usual, in the girls
crying because of the poor rats. Girls cannot help this; we must not
be waxy with them on account of it, they have their nature, the same as
bull-dogs have, and it is this that makes them so useful in smoothing
the pillows of the sick-bed and tending wounded heroes.

However, the forts, and Pincher, and the girls crying, and having to be
thumped on the back, passed the time very agreeably till dinner. There
was roast mutton with onion sauce, and a roly-poly pudding.

Albert’s uncle said we had certainly effaced ourselves effectually,
which means we hadn’t bothered.

So we determined to do the same during the afternoon, for he told us his
heroine was by no means out of the wood yet.

And at first it was easy. Jam roly gives you a peaceful feeling and you
do not at first care if you never play any runabout game ever any more.
But after a while the torpor begins to pass away. Oswald was the first
to recover from his.

He had been lying on his front part in the orchard, but now he turned
over on his back and kicked his legs up, and said--

‘I say, look here; let’s do something.’

Daisy looked thoughtful. She was chewing the soft yellow parts of grass,
but I could see she was still thinking about that animal race. So I
explained to her that it would be very poor fun without a tortoise and a
peacock, and she saw this, though not willingly.

It was H. O. who said--

‘Doing anything with animals is prime, if they only will. Let’s have a
circus!’

At the word the last thought of the pudding faded from Oswald’s memory,
and he stretched himself, sat up, and said--

‘Bully for H. O. Let’s!’

The others also threw off the heavy weight of memory, and sat up and
said ‘Let’s!’ too.

Never, never in all our lives had we had such a gay galaxy of animals at
our command. The rabbits and the guinea-pigs, and even all the bright,
glass-eyed, stuffed denizens of our late-lamented jungle paled into
insignificance before the number of live things on the farm.

(I hope you do not think that the words I use are getting too long. I
know they are the right words. And Albert’s uncle says your style is
always altered a bit by what you read. And I have been reading the
Vicomte de Bragelonne. Nearly all my new words come out of those.)

‘The worst of a circus is,’ Dora said, ‘that you’ve got to teach the
animals things. A circus where the performing creatures hadn’t learned
performing would be a bit silly. Let’s give up a week to teaching them
and then have the circus.’

Some people have no idea of the value of time. And Dora is one of those
who do not understand that when you want to do a thing you do want to,
and not to do something else, and perhaps your own thing, a week later.

Oswald said the first thing was to collect the performing animals.

‘Then perhaps,’ he said, ‘we may find that they have hidden talents
hitherto unsuspected by their harsh masters.’

So Denny took a pencil and wrote a list of the animals required. This is
it:

     LIST OF ANIMALS REQUISITE FOR THE
     CIRCUS WE ARE GOING TO HAVE

   1 Bull for bull-fight.
   1 Horse for ditto (if possible).
   1 Goat to do Alpine feats of daring.
   1 Donkey to play see-saw.
   2 White pigs--one to be Learned, and the other to play with the clown.
   Turkeys, as many as possible, because they can make a noise that
           that sounds like an audience applauding
   The dogs, for any odd parts.
   1 Large black pig--to be the Elephant in the procession.
   Calves (several) to be camels, and to stand on tubs.

Daisy ought to have been captain because it was partly her idea, but she
let Oswald be, because she is of a retiring character. Oswald said--

‘The first thing is to get all the creatures together; the paddock at
the side of the orchard is the very place, because the hedge is good all
round. When we’ve got the performers all there we’ll make a programme,
and then dress for our parts. It’s a pity there won’t be any audience
but the turkeys.’

We took the animals in their right order, according to Denny’s list. The
bull was the first. He is black. He does not live in the cowhouse with
the other horned people; he has a house all to himself two fields away.
Oswald and Alice went to fetch him. They took a halter to lead the bull
by, and a whip, not to hurt the bull with, but just to make him mind.

The others were to try to get one of the horses while we were gone.

Oswald as usual was full of bright ideas.

‘I daresay,’ he said, ‘the bull will be shy at first, and he’ll have to
be goaded into the arena.’

‘But goads hurt,’ Alice said.

‘They don’t hurt the bull,’ Oswald said; ‘his powerful hide is too
thick.’

‘Then why does he attend to it,’ Alice asked, ‘if it doesn’t hurt?’

‘Properly-brought-up bulls attend because they know they ought,’
Oswald said. ‘I think I shall ride the bull,’ the brave boy went on.
‘A bull-fight, where an intrepid rider appears on the bull, sharing its
joys and sorrows. It would be something quite new.’

‘You can’t ride bulls,’ Alice said; ‘at least, not if their backs are
sharp like cows.’

But Oswald thought he could. The bull lives in a house made of wood and
prickly furze bushes, and he has a yard to his house. You cannot climb
on the roof of his house at all comfortably.

When we got there he was half in his house and half out in his yard, and
he was swinging his tail because of the flies which bothered. It was a
very hot day.

‘You’ll see,’ Alice said, ‘he won’t want a goad. He’ll be so glad to
get out for a walk he’ll drop his head in my hand like a tame fawn, and
follow me lovingly all the way.’

Oswald called to him. He said, ‘Bull! Bull! Bull! Bull!’ because we did
not know the animal’s real name. The bull took no notice; then Oswald
picked up a stone and threw it at the bull, not angrily, but just to
make it pay attention. But the bull did not pay a farthing’s worth of
it. So then Oswald leaned over the iron gate of the bull’s yard and just
flicked the bull with the whiplash. And then the bull DID pay attention.
He started when the lash struck him, then suddenly he faced round,
uttering a roar like that of the wounded King of Beasts, and putting his
head down close to his feet he ran straight at the iron gate where we
were standing.

Alice and Oswald mechanically turned away; they did not wish to annoy
the bull any more, and they ran as fast as they could across the field
so as not to keep the others waiting.

As they ran across the field Oswald had a dream-like fancy that perhaps
the bull had rooted up the gate with one paralysing blow, and was now
tearing across the field after him and Alice, with the broken gate
balanced on its horns. We climbed the stile quickly and looked back; the
bull was still on the right side of the gate.

Oswald said, ‘I think we’ll do without the bull. He did not seem to want
to come. We must be kind to dumb animals.’

Alice said, between laughing and crying--

‘Oh, Oswald, how can you!’ But we did do without the bull, and we did
not tell the others how we had hurried to get back. We just said, ‘The
bull didn’t seem to care about coming.’

The others had not been idle. They had got old Clover, the cart-horse,
but she would do nothing but graze, so we decided not to use her in the
bull-fight, but to let her be the Elephant. The Elephant’s is a nice
quiet part, and she was quite big enough for a young one. Then the black
pig could be Learned, and the other two could be something else. They
had also got the goat; he was tethered to a young tree.

The donkey was there. Denny was leading him in the halter. The dogs were
there, of course--they always are.

So now we only had to get the turkeys for the applause and the calves
and pigs.

The calves were easy to get, because they were in their own house. There
were five. And the pigs were in their houses too. We got them out after
long and patient toil, and persuaded them that they wanted to go into
the paddock, where the circus was to be. This is done by pretending to
drive them the other way. A pig only knows two ways--the way you want
him to go, and the other. But the turkeys knew thousands of different
ways, and tried them all. They made such an awful row, we had to drop
all ideas of ever hearing applause from their lips, so we came away and
left them.

‘Never mind,’ H. O. said, ‘they’ll be sorry enough afterwards, nasty,
unobliging things, because now they won’t see the circus. I hope the
other animals will tell them about it.’

While the turkeys were engaged in baffling the rest of us, Dicky had
found three sheep who seemed to wish to join the glad throng, so we let
them.

Then we shut the gate of the paddock, and left the dumb circus
performers to make friends with each other while we dressed.

Oswald and H. O. were to be clowns. It is quite easy with Albert’s
uncle’s pyjamas, and flour on your hair and face, and the red they do
the brick-floors with.

Alice had very short pink and white skirts, and roses in her hair and
round her dress. Her dress was the pink calico and white muslin stuff
off the dressing-table in the girls’ room fastened with pins and tied
round the waist with a small bath towel. She was to be the Dauntless
Equestrienne, and to give her enhancing act a barebacked daring, riding
either a pig or a sheep, whichever we found was freshest and most
skittish. Dora was dressed for the Haute ecole, which means a
riding-habit and a high hat. She took Dick’s topper that he wears with
his Etons, and a skirt of Mrs Pettigrew’s. Daisy, dressed the same as
Alice, taking the muslin from Mrs Pettigrew’s dressing-table without
saying anything beforehand. None of us would have advised this, and
indeed we were thinking of trying to put it back, when Denny and Noel,
who were wishing to look like highwaymen, with brown-paper top-boots
and slouch hats and Turkish towel cloaks, suddenly stopped dressing and
gazed out of the window.

‘Krikey!’ said Dick, ‘come on, Oswald!’ and he bounded like an antelope
from the room.

Oswald and the rest followed, casting a hasty glance through the window.
Noel had got brown-paper boots too, and a Turkish towel cloak. H. O. had
been waiting for Dora to dress him up for the other clown. He had only
his shirt and knickerbockers and his braces on. He came down as he
was--as indeed we all did. And no wonder, for in the paddock, where the
circus was to be, a blood-thrilling thing had transpired. The dogs were
chasing the sheep. And we had now lived long enough in the country to
know the fell nature of our dogs’ improper conduct.

We all rushed into the paddock, calling to Pincher, and Martha, and
Lady. Pincher came almost at once. He is a well-brought-up dog--Oswald
trained him. Martha did not seem to hear. She is awfully deaf, but
she did not matter so much, because the sheep could walk away from her
easily. She has no pace and no wind. But Lady is a deer-hound. She
is used to pursuing that fleet and antlered pride of the forest--the
stag--and she can go like billyo. She was now far away in a distant
region of the paddock, with a fat sheep just before her in full flight.
I am sure if ever anybody’s eyes did start out of their heads with
horror, like in narratives of adventure, ours did then.

There was a moment’s pause of speechless horror. We expected to see Lady
pull down her quarry, and we know what a lot of money a sheep costs, to
say nothing of its own personal feelings.

Then we started to run for all we were worth. It is hard to run
swiftly as the arrow from the bow when you happen to be wearing pyjamas
belonging to a grown-up person--as I was--but even so I beat Dicky. He
said afterwards it was because his brown-paper boots came undone and
tripped him up. Alice came in third. She held on the dressing-table
muslin and ran jolly well. But ere we reached the fatal spot all was
very nearly up with the sheep. We heard a plop; Lady stopped and looked
round. She must have heard us bellowing to her as we ran. Then she came
towards us, prancing with happiness, but we said ‘Down!’ and ‘Bad dog!’
and ran sternly on.

When we came to the brook which forms the northern boundary of the
paddock we saw the sheep struggling in the water. It is not very deep,
and I believe the sheep could have stood up, and been well in its depth,
if it had liked, but it would not try.

It was a steepish bank. Alice and I got down and stuck our legs into the
water, and then Dicky came down, and the three of us hauled that sheep
up by its shoulders till it could rest on Alice and me as we sat on the
bank. It kicked all the time we were hauling. It gave one extra kick
at last, that raised it up, and I tell you that sopping wet, heavy,
panting, silly donkey of a sheep sat there on our laps like a pet dog;
and Dicky got his shoulder under it at the back and heaved constantly to
keep it from flumping off into the water again, while the others fetched
the shepherd.

When the shepherd came he called us every name you can think of, and
then he said--

‘Good thing master didn’t come along. He would ha’ called you some tidy
names.’

He got the sheep out, and took it and the others away. And the calves
too. He did not seem to care about the other performing animals.

Alice, Oswald and Dick had had almost enough circus for just then, so
we sat in the sun and dried ourselves and wrote the programme of the
circus. This was it:


               PROGRAMME

1. Startling leap from the lofty precipice by the performing sheep. Real
water, and real precipice. The gallant rescue. O. A. and D. Bastable.
(We thought we might as well put that in though it was over and had
happened accidentally.)

2. Graceful bare-backed equestrienne act on the trained pig, Eliza. A.
Bastable. 3. Amusing clown interlude, introducing trained dog, Pincher,
and the other white pig. H. O. and O. Bastable.

4. The See-Saw. Trained donkeys. (H. O. said we had only one donkey, so
Dicky said H. O. could be the other. When peace was restored we went on
to 5.)

5. Elegant equestrian act by D. Bastable. Haute ecole, on Clover, the
incomparative trained elephant from the plains of Venezuela.

6. Alpine feat of daring. The climbing of the Andes, by Billy, the
well-known acrobatic goat. (We thought we could make the Andes out of
hurdles and things, and so we could have but for what always happens.
(This is the unexpected. (This is a saying Father told me--but I see
I am three deep in brackets so I will close them before I get into any
more).).).

7. The Black but Learned Pig. [‘I daresay he knows something,’ Alice
said, ‘if we can only find out what.’ We DID find out all too soon.)


We could not think of anything else, and our things were nearly dry--all
except Dick’s brown-paper top-boots, which were mingled with the
gurgling waters of the brook.

We went back to the seat of action--which was the iron trough where the
sheep have their salt put--and began to dress up the creatures.

We had just tied the Union Jack we made out of Daisy’s flannel petticoat
and cetera, when we gave the soldiers the baccy, round the waist of the
Black and Learned Pig, when we heard screams from the back part of the
house, and suddenly we saw that Billy, the acrobatic goat, had got loose
from the tree we had tied him to. (He had eaten all the parts of its
bark that he could get at, but we did not notice it until next day, when
led to the spot by a grown-up.)

The gate of the paddock was open. The gate leading to the bridge that
goes over the moat to the back door was open too. We hastily proceeded
in the direction of the screams, and, guided by the sound, threaded
our way into the kitchen. As we went, Noel, ever fertile in melancholy
ideas, said he wondered whether Mrs Pettigrew was being robbed, or only
murdered.

In the kitchen we saw that Noel was wrong as usual. It was neither. Mrs
Pettigrew, screaming like a steam-siren and waving a broom, occupied
the foreground. In the distance the maid was shrieking in a hoarse and
monotonous way, and trying to shut herself up inside a clothes-horse on
which washing was being aired.

On the dresser--which he had ascended by a chair--was Billy, the
acrobatic goat, doing his Alpine daring act. He had found out his Andes
for himself, and even as we gazed he turned and tossed his head in a
way that showed us some mysterious purpose was hidden beneath his calm
exterior. The next moment he put his off-horn neatly behind the end
plate of the next to the bottom row, and ran it along against the wall.
The plates fell crashing on to the soup tureen and vegetable dishes
which adorned the lower range of the Andes.

Mrs Pettigrew’s screams were almost drowned in the discarding crash and
crackle of the falling avalanche of crockery.

Oswald, though stricken with horror and polite regret, preserved the
most dauntless coolness.

Disregarding the mop which Mrs Pettigrew kept on poking at the goat in
a timid yet cross way, he sprang forward, crying out to his trusty
followers, ‘Stand by to catch him!’

But Dick had thought of the same thing, and ere Oswald could carry out
his long-cherished and general-like design, Dicky had caught the goat’s
legs and tripped it up. The goat fell against another row of plates,
righted itself hastily in the gloomy ruins of the soup tureen and the
sauce-boats, and then fell again, this time towards Dicky. The two fell
heavily on the ground together. The trusty followers had been so struck
by the daring of Dicky and his lion-hearted brother, that they had not
stood by to catch anything.

The goat was not hurt, but Dicky had a sprained thumb and a lump on his
head like a black marble door-knob. He had to go to bed.

I will draw a veil and asterisks over what Mrs Pettigrew said. Also
Albert’s uncle, who was brought to the scene of ruin by her screams. Few
words escaped our lips. There are times when it is not wise to argue;
however, little what has occurred is really our fault.

When they had said what they deemed enough and we were let go, we all
went out. Then Alice said distractedly, in a voice which she vainly
strove to render firm--

‘Let’s give up the circus. Let’s put the toys back in the boxes--no,
I don’t mean that--the creatures in their places--and drop the whole
thing. I want to go and read to Dicky.’

Oswald has a spirit that no reverses can depreciate. He hates to be
beaten. But he gave in to Alice, as the others said so too, and we went
out to collect the performing troop and sort it out into its proper
places.

Alas! we came too late. In the interest we had felt about whether Mrs
Pettigrew was the abject victim of burglars or not, we had left both
gates open again. The old horse--I mean the trained elephant from
Venezuela--was there all right enough. The dogs we had beaten and tied
up after the first act, when the intrepid sheep bounded, as it says in
the programme. The two white pigs were there, but the donkey was gone.
We heard his hoofs down the road, growing fainter and fainter, in the
direction of the ‘Rose and Crown’. And just round the gatepost we saw
a flash of red and white and blue and black that told us, with dumb
signification, that the pig was off in exactly the opposite direction.
Why couldn’t they have gone the same way? But no, one was a pig and the
other was a donkey, as Denny said afterwards.

Daisy and H. O. started after the donkey; the rest of us, with one
accord, pursued the pig--I don’t know why. It trotted quietly down the
road; it looked very black against the white road, and the ends on the
top, where the Union Jack was tied, bobbed brightly as it trotted. At
first we thought it would be easy to catch up to it. This was an error.

When we ran faster it ran faster; when we stopped it stopped and looked
round at us, and nodded. (I daresay you won’t swallow this, but you may
safely. It’s as true as true, and so’s all that about the goat. I give
you my sacred word of honour.) I tell you the pig nodded as much as to
say--

‘Oh, yes. You think you will, but you won’t!’ and then as soon as we
moved again off it went. That pig led us on and on, o’er miles and miles
of strange country. One thing, it did keep to the roads. When we met
people, which wasn’t often, we called out to them to help us, but they
only waved their arms and roared with laughter. One chap on a bicycle
almost tumbled off his machine, and then he got off it and propped it
against a gate and sat down in the hedge to laugh properly. You remember
Alice was still dressed up as the gay equestrienne in the dressing-table
pink and white, with rosy garlands, now very droopy, and she had no
stockings on, only white sand-shoes, because she thought they would be
easier than boots for balancing on the pig in the graceful bare-backed
act.

Oswald was attired in red paint and flour and pyjamas, for a clown.
It is really IMPOSSIBLE to run speedfully in another man’s pyjamas,
so Oswald had taken them off, and wore his own brown knickerbockers
belonging to his Norfolks. He had tied the pyjamas round his neck, to
carry them easily. He was afraid to leave them in a ditch, as Alice
suggested, because he did not know the roads, and for aught he recked
they might have been infested with footpads. If it had been his own
pyjamas it would have been different. (I’m going to ask for pyjamas next
winter, they are so useful in many ways.)

Noel was a highwayman in brown-paper gaiters and bath towels and a
cocked hat of newspaper. I don’t know how he kept it on. And the pig was
encircled by the dauntless banner of our country. All the same, I think
if I had seen a band of youthful travellers in bitter distress about a
pig I should have tried to lend a helping hand and not sat roaring in
the hedge, no matter how the travellers and the pig might have been
dressed.

It was hotter than anyone would believe who has never had occasion to
hunt the pig when dressed for quite another part. The flour got out of
Oswald’s hair into his eyes and his mouth. His brow was wet with what
the village blacksmith’s was wet with, and not his fair brow alone. It
ran down his face and washed the red off in streaks, and when he
rubbed his eyes he only made it worse. Alice had to run holding the
equestrienne skirts on with both hands, and I think the brown-paper
boots bothered Noel from the first. Dora had her skirt over her arm and
carried the topper in her hand. It was no use to tell ourselves it was a
wild boar hunt--we were long past that.

At last we met a man who took pity on us. He was a kind-hearted man. I
think, perhaps, he had a pig of his own--or, perhaps, children. Honour
to his name!

He stood in the middle of the road and waved his arms. The pig
right-wheeled through a gate into a private garden and cantered up the
drive. We followed. What else were we to do, I should like to know?

The Learned Black Pig seemed to know its way. It turned first to the
right and then to the left, and emerged on a lawn.

‘Now, all together!’ cried Oswald, mustering his failing voice to give
the word of command. ‘Surround him!--cut off his retreat!’

We almost surrounded him. He edged off towards the house.

‘Now we’ve got him!’ cried the crafty Oswald, as the pig got on to a bed
of yellow pansies close against the red house wall.

All would even then have been well, but Denny, at the last, shrank from
meeting the pig face to face in a manly way. He let the pig pass him,
and the next moment, with a squeak that said ‘There now!’ as plain as
words, the pig bolted into a French window. The pursuers halted not.
This was no time for trivial ceremony. In another moment the pig was a
captive. Alice and Oswald had their arms round him under the ruins of a
table that had had teacups on it, and around the hunters and their prey
stood the startled members of a parish society for making clothes for
the poor heathen, that that pig had led us into the very midst of. They
were reading a missionary report or something when we ran our quarry
to earth under their table. Even as he crossed the threshold I heard
something about ‘black brothers being already white to the harvest’. All
the ladies had been sewing flannel things for the poor blacks while the
curate read aloud to them. You think they screamed when they saw the Pig
and Us? You are right.

On the whole, I cannot say that the missionary people behaved badly.
Oswald explained that it was entirely the pig’s doing, and asked pardon
quite properly for any alarm the ladies had felt; and Alice said how
sorry we were but really it was NOT our fault this time. The curate
looked a bit nasty, but the presence of ladies made him keep his hot
blood to himself.

When we had explained, we said, ‘Might we go?’ The curate said, ‘The
sooner the better.’ But the Lady of the House asked for our names and
addresses, and said she should write to our Father. (She did, and we
heard of it too.) They did not do anything to us, as Oswald at one time
believed to be the curate’s idea. They let us go.

And we went, after we had asked for a piece of rope to lead the pig by.

‘In case it should come back into your nice room,’ Alice said. ‘And that
would be such a pity, wouldn’t it?’

A little girl in a starched pinafore was sent for the rope. And as soon
as the pig had agreed to let us tie it round his neck we came away. The
scene in the drawing-room had not been long. The pig went slowly,

‘Like the meandering brook,’

Denny said. Just by the gate the shrubs rustled and opened, and the
little girl came out. Her pinafore was full of cake.

‘Here,’ she said. ‘You must be hungry if you’ve come all that way.

I think they might have given you some tea after all the trouble you’ve
had.’ We took the cake with correct thanks.

‘I wish I could play at circuses,’ she said. ‘Tell me about it.’

We told her while we ate the cake; and when we had done she said perhaps
it was better to hear about than do, especially the goat’s part and
Dicky’s.

‘But I do wish auntie had given you tea,’ she said.

We told her not to be too hard on her aunt, because you have to make
allowances for grown-up people. When we parted she said she would never
forget us, and Oswald gave her his pocket button-hook and corkscrew
combined for a keepsake.

Dicky’s act with the goat (which is true, and no kid) was the only thing
out of that day that was put in the Golden Deed book, and he put that in
himself while we were hunting the pig.

Alice and me capturing the pig was never put in. We would scorn to write
our own good actions, but I suppose Dicky was dull with us all away; and
you must pity the dull, and not blame them.

I will not seek to unfold to you how we got the pig home, or how the
donkey was caught (that was poor sport compared to the pig). Nor will I
tell you a word of all that was said and done to the intrepid hunters
of the Black and Learned. I have told you all the interesting part. Seek
not to know the rest. It is better buried in obliquity.


CHAPTER 7. BEING BEAVERS; OR, THE YOUNG EXPLORERS     (ARCTIC OR OTHERWISE)

You read in books about the pleasures of London, and about how people
who live in the country long for the gay whirl of fashion in town
because the country is so dull. I do not agree with this at all. In
London, or at any rate Lewisham, nothing happens unless you make it
happen; or if it happens it doesn’t happen to you, and you don’t know
the people it does happen to. But in the country the most interesting
events occur quite freely, and they seem to happen to you as much as to
anyone else. Very often quite without your doing anything to help.

The natural and right ways of earning your living in the country are
much jollier than town ones, too; sowing and reaping, and doing things
with animals, are much better sport than fishmongering or bakering or
oil-shopping, and those sort of things, except, of course, a plumber’s
and gasfitter’s, and he is the same in town or country--most interesting
and like an engineer.

I remember what a nice man it was that came to cut the gas off once
at our old house in Lewisham, when my father’s business was feeling
so poorly. He was a true gentleman, and gave Oswald and Dicky over
two yards and a quarter of good lead piping, and a brass tap that only
wanted a washer, and a whole handful of screws to do what we liked with.
We screwed the back door up with the screws, I remember, one night when
Eliza was out without leave. There was an awful row. We did not mean
to get her into trouble. We only thought it would be amusing for her to
find the door screwed up when she came down to take in the milk in the
morning. But I must not say any more about the Lewisham house. It is
only the pleasures of memory, and nothing to do with being beavers, or
any sort of exploring.

I think Dora and Daisy are the kind of girls who will grow up very good,
and perhaps marry missionaries. I am glad Oswald’s destiny looks at
present as if it might be different.

We made two expeditions to discover the source of the Nile (or the North
Pole), and owing to their habit of sticking together and doing dull and
praiseable things, like sewing, and helping with the cooking, and taking
invalid delicacies to the poor and indignant, Daisy and Dora were wholly
out of it both times, though Dora’s foot was now quite well enough to
have gone to the North Pole or the Equator either. They said they did
not mind the first time, because they like to keep themselves clean; it
is another of their queer ways. And they said they had had a better time
than us. (It was only a clergyman and his wife who called, and hot cakes
for tea.) The second time they said they were lucky not to have been in
it. And perhaps they were right. But let me to my narrating. I hope you
will like it. I am going to try to write it a different way, like the
books they give you for a prize at a girls’ school--I mean a ‘young
ladies’ school’, of course--not a high school. High schools are not
nearly so silly as some other kinds. Here goes:

‘“Ah, me!” sighed a slender maiden of twelve summers, removing her
elegant hat and passing her tapery fingers lightly through her fair
tresses, “how sad it is--is it not?--to see able-bodied youths and young
ladies wasting the precious summer hours in idleness and luxury.”

‘The maiden frowned reproachingly, but yet with earnest gentleness, at
the group of youths and maidens who sat beneath an umbragipeaous beech
tree and ate black currants.

‘“Dear brothers and sisters,” the blushing girl went on, “could we not,
even now, at the eleventh hour, turn to account these wasted lives of
ours, and seek some occupation at once improving and agreeable?”

‘“I do not quite follow your meaning, dear sister,” replied the
cleverest of her brothers, on whose brow--’


It’s no use. I can’t write like these books. I wonder how the books’
authors can keep it up.

What really happened was that we were all eating black currants in the
orchard, out of a cabbage leaf, and Alice said--

‘I say, look here, let’s do something. It’s simply silly to waste a day
like this. It’s just on eleven. Come on!’

And Oswald said, ‘Where to?’

This was the beginning of it.

The moat that is all round our house is fed by streams. One of them is
a sort of open overflow pipe from a good-sized stream that flows at the
other side of the orchard.

It was this stream that Alice meant when she said--

‘Why not go and discover the source of the Nile?’

Of course Oswald knows quite well that the source of the real live
Egyptian Nile is no longer buried in that mysteriousness where it lurked
undisturbed for such a long time. But he was not going to say so. It is
a great thing to know when not to say things.

‘Why not have it an Arctic expedition?’ said Dicky; ‘then we could take
an ice-axe, and live on blubber and things. Besides, it sounds cooler.’

‘Vote! vote!’ cried Oswald. So we did. Oswald, Alice, Noel, and Denny
voted for the river of the ibis and the crocodile. Dicky, H. O., and the
other girls for the region of perennial winter and rich blubber.

So Alice said, ‘We can decide as we go. Let’s start anyway.’

The question of supplies had now to be gone into. Everybody wanted to
take something different, and nobody thought the other people’s things
would be the slightest use. It is sometimes thus even with grown-up
expeditions. So then Oswald, who is equal to the hardest emergency that
ever emerged yet, said--

‘Let’s each get what we like. The secret storehouse can be the shed in
the corner of the stableyard where we got the door for the raft. Then
the captain can decide who’s to take what.’

This was done. You may think it but the work of a moment to fit out an
expedition, but this is not so, especially when you know not whether
your exploring party is speeding to Central Africa or merely to the
world of icebergs and the Polar bear.

Dicky wished to take the wood-axe, the coal hammer, a blanket, and a
mackintosh.

H. O. brought a large faggot in case we had to light fires, and a pair
of old skates he had happened to notice in the box-room, in case the
expedition turned out icy.

Noel had nicked a dozen boxes of matches, a spade, and a trowel, and had
also obtained--I know not by what means--a jar of pickled onions.

Denny had a walking-stick--we can’t break him of walking with it--a book
to read in case he got tired of being a discoverer, a butterfly net and
a box with a cork in it, a tennis ball, if we happened to want to play
rounders in the pauses of exploring, two towels and an umbrella in the
event of camping or if the river got big enough to bathe in or to be
fallen into.

Alice had a comforter for Noel in case we got late, a pair of scissors
and needle and cotton, two whole candles in case of caves.

And she had thoughtfully brought the tablecloth off the small table in
the dining-room, so that we could make all the things up into one bundle
and take it in turns to carry it.

Oswald had fastened his master mind entirely on grub. Nor had the others
neglected this.

All the stores for the expedition were put down on the tablecloth and
the corners tied up. Then it was more than even Oswald’s muscley arms
could raise from the ground, so we decided not to take it, but only the
best-selected grub. The rest we hid in the straw loft, for there are
many ups and downs in life, and grub is grub at any time, and so are
stores of all kinds. The pickled onions we had to leave, but not for
ever.

Then Dora and Daisy came along with their arms round each other’s necks
as usual, like a picture on a grocer’s almanac, and said they weren’t
coming.

It was, as I have said, a blazing hot day, and there were differences of
opinion among the explorers about what eatables we ought to have taken,
and H. O. had lost one of his garters and wouldn’t let Alice tie it up
with her handkerchief, which the gentle sister was quite willing to do.
So it was a rather gloomy expedition that set off that bright sunny day
to seek the source of the river where Cleopatra sailed in Shakespeare
(or the frozen plains Mr Nansen wrote that big book about).

But the balmy calm of peaceful Nature soon made the others less
cross--Oswald had not been cross exactly but only disinclined to do
anything the others wanted--and by the time we had followed the stream
a little way, and had seen a water-rat and shied a stone or two at him,
harmony was restored. We did not hit the rat.

You will understand that we were not the sort of people to have lived so
long near a stream without plumbing its depths. Indeed it was the same
stream the sheep took its daring jump into the day we had the circus.
And of course we had often paddled in it--in the shallower parts. But
now our hearts were set on exploring. At least they ought to have
been, but when we got to the place where the stream goes under a wooden
sheep-bridge, Dicky cried, ‘A camp! a camp!’ and we were all glad to sit
down at once. Not at all like real explorers, who know no rest, day or
night, till they have got there (whether it’s the North Pole, or the
central point of the part marked ‘Desert of Sahara’ on old-fashioned
maps).

The food supplies obtained by various members were good and plenty
of it. Cake, hard eggs, sausage-rolls, currants, lemon cheese-cakes,
raisins, and cold apple dumplings. It was all very decent, but Oswald
could not help feeling that the source of the Nile (or North Pole) was a
long way off, and perhaps nothing much when you got there.

So he was not wholly displeased when Denny said, as he lay kicking into
the bank when the things to eat were all gone--

‘I believe this is clay: did you ever make huge platters and bowls out
of clay and dry them in the sun? Some people did in a book called Foul
Play, and I believe they baked turtles, or oysters, or something, at the
same time.’

He took up a bit of clay and began to mess it about, like you do putty
when you get hold of a bit. And at once the heavy gloom that had hung
over the explorers became expelled, and we all got under the shadow of
the bridge and messed about with clay.

‘It will be jolly!’ Alice said, ‘and we can give the huge platters to
poor cottagers who are short of the usual sorts of crockery. That would
really be a very golden deed.’

It is harder than you would think when you read about it, to make huge
platters with clay. It flops about as soon as you get it any size,
unless you keep it much too thick, and then when you turn up the edges
they crack. Yet we did not mind the trouble. And we had all got our
shoes and stockings off. It is impossible to go on being cross when your
feet are in cold water; and there is something in the smooth messiness
of clay, and not minding how dirty you get, that would soothe the
savagest breast that ever beat.

After a bit, though, we gave up the idea of the huge platter and tried
little things. We made some platters--they were like flower-pot saucers;
and Alice made a bowl by doubling up her fists and getting Noel to slab
the clay on outside. Then they smoothed the thing inside and out with
wet fingers, and it was a bowl--at least they said it was. When we’d
made a lot of things we set them in the sun to dry, and then it seemed
a pity not to do the thing thoroughly. So we made a bonfire, and when it
had burnt down we put our pots on the soft, white, hot ashes among the
little red sparks, and kicked the ashes over them and heaped more fuel
over the top. It was a fine fire.

Then tea-time seemed as if it ought to be near, and we decided to come
back next day and get our pots.

As we went home across the fields Dicky looked back and said--

‘The bonfire’s going pretty strong.’

We looked. It was. Great flames were rising to heaven against the
evening sky. And we had left it,a smouldering flat heap.

‘The clay must have caught alight,’ H. O. said. ‘Perhaps it’s the kind
that burns. I know I’ve heard of fireclay. And there’s another sort you
can eat.’

‘Oh, shut up!’ Dicky said with anxious scorn.

With one accord we turned back. We all felt THE feeling--the one that
means something fatal being up and it being your fault.

‘Perhaps, Alice said, ‘a beautiful young lady in a muslin dress was
passing by, and a spark flew on to her, and now she is rolling in agony
enveloped in flames.’

We could not see the fire now, because of the corner of the wood, but we
hoped Alice was mistaken.

But when we got in sight of the scene of our pottering industry we saw
it was as bad nearly as Alice’s wild dream. For the wooden fence leading
up to the bridge had caught fire, and it was burning like billy oh.

Oswald started to run; so did the others. As he ran he said to himself,
‘This is no time to think about your clothes. Oswald, be bold!’

And he was.

Arrived at the site of the conflagration, he saw that caps or straw hats
full of water, however quickly and perseveringly given, would never put
the bridge out, and his eventful past life made him know exactly the
sort of wigging you get for an accident like this.

So he said, ‘Dicky, soak your jacket and mine in the stream and chuck
them along. Alice, stand clear, or your silly girl’s clothes’ll catch as
sure as fate.’

Dicky and Oswald tore off their jackets, so did Denny, but we would not
let him and H. O. wet theirs. Then the brave Oswald advanced warily to
the end of the burning rails and put his wet jacket over the end bit,
like a linseed poultice on the throat of a suffering invalid who has
got bronchitis. The burning wood hissed and smouldered, and Oswald fell
back, almost choked with the smoke. But at once he caught up the other
wet jacket and put it on another place, and of course it did the trick
as he had known it would do. But it was a long job, and the smoke in his
eyes made the young hero obliged to let Dicky and Denny take a turn
as they had bothered to do from the first. At last all was safe; the
devouring element was conquered. We covered up the beastly bonfire with
clay to keep it from getting into mischief again, and then Alice said--

‘Now we must go and tell.’

‘Of course,’ Oswald said shortly. He had meant to tell all the time.

So we went to the farmer who has the Moat House Farm, and we went at
once, because if you have any news like that to tell it only makes it
worse if you wait about. When we had told him he said--

‘You little ---.’ I shall not say what he said besides that, because
I am sure he must have been sorry for it next Sunday when he went to
church, if not before.

We did not take any notice of what he said, but just kept on saying how
sorry we were; and he did not take our apology like a man, but only
said he daresayed, just like a woman does. Then he went to look at his
bridge, and we went in to our tea. The jackets were never quite the same
again.

Really great explorers would never be discouraged by the daresaying of
a farmer, still less by his calling them names he ought not to. Albert’s
uncle was away so we got no double slating; and next day we started
again to discover the source of the river of cataracts (or the region of
mountain-like icebergs).

We set out, heavily provisioned with a large cake Daisy and Dora had
made themselves, and six bottles of ginger-beer. I think real explorers
most likely have their ginger-beer in something lighter to carry than
stone bottles. Perhaps they have it by the cask, which would come
cheaper; and you could make the girls carry it on their back, like in
pictures of the daughters of regiments.

We passed the scene of the devouring conflagration, and the thought
of the fire made us so thirsty we decided to drink the ginger-beer and
leave the bottles in a place of concealment. Then we went on, determined
to reach our destination, Tropic or Polar, that day.

Denny and H. O. wanted to stop and try to make a fashionable
watering-place at that part where the stream spreads out like a
small-sized sea, but Noel said, ‘No.’ We did not like fashionableness.

‘YOU ought to, at any rate,’ Denny said. ‘A Mr Collins wrote an Ode to
the Fashions, and he was a great poet.’

‘The poet Milton wrote a long book about Satan,’ Noel said, ‘but I’m not
bound to like HIM.’ I think it was smart of Noel.

‘People aren’t obliged to like everything they write about even, let
alone read,’ Alice said. ‘Look at “Ruin seize thee, ruthless king!”
 and all the pieces of poetry about war, and tyrants, and slaughtered
saints--and the one you made yourself about the black beetle, Noel.’

By this time we had got by the pondy place and the danger of delay was
past; but the others went on talking about poetry for quite a field and
a half, as we walked along by the banks of the stream. The stream was
broad and shallow at this part, and you could see the stones and
gravel at the bottom, and millions of baby fishes, and a sort of
skating-spiders walking about on the top of the water. Denny said the
water must be ice for them to be able to walk on it, and this showed we
were getting near the North Pole. But Oswald had seen a kingfisher by
the wood, and he said it was an ibis, so this was even.

When Oswald had had as much poetry as he could bear he said, ‘Let’s be
beavers and make a dam.’ And everybody was so hot they agreed joyously,
and soon our clothes were tucked up as far as they could go and our legs
looked green through the water, though they were pink out of it.

Making a dam is jolly good fun, though laborious, as books about beavers
take care to let you know.

Dicky said it must be Canada if we were beavers, and so it was on the
way to the Polar system, but Oswald pointed to his heated brow, and
Dicky owned it was warm for Polar regions. He had brought the ice-axe
(it is called the wood chopper sometimes), and Oswald, ever ready and
able to command, set him and Denny to cut turfs from the bank while we
heaped stones across the stream. It was clayey here, or of course dam
making would have been vain, even for the best-trained beaver.

When we had made a ridge of stones we laid turfs against them--nearly
across the stream, leaving about two feet for the water to go
through--then more stones, and then lumps of clay stamped down as hard
as we could. The industrious beavers spent hours over it, with only one
easy to eat cake in. And at last the dam rose to the level of the bank.
Then the beavers collected a great heap of clay, and four of them lifted
it and dumped it down in the opening where the water was running. It did
splash a little, but a true-hearted beaver knows better than to mind a
bit of a wetting, as Oswald told Alice at the time. Then with more clay
the work was completed. We must have used tons of clay; there was quite
a big long hole in the bank above the dam where we had taken it out.

When our beaver task was performed we went on, and Dicky was so hot he
had to take his jacket off and shut up about icebergs.

I cannot tell you about all the windings of the stream; it went through
fields and woods and meadows, and at last the banks got steeper and
higher, and the trees overhead darkly arched their mysterious branches,
and we felt like the princes in a fairy tale who go out to seek their
fortunes.

And then we saw a thing that was well worth coming all that way for; the
stream suddenly disappeared under a dark stone archway, and however much
you stood in the water and stuck your head down between your knees you
could not see any light at the other end.

The stream was much smaller than where we had been beavers.

Gentle reader, you will guess in a moment who it was that said--

‘Alice, you’ve got a candle. Let’s explore.’ This gallant proposal met
but a cold response. The others said they didn’t care much about it, and
what about tea?

I often think the way people try to hide their cowardliness behind their
teas is simply beastly.

Oswald took no notice. He just said, with that dignified manner, not at
all like sulking, which he knows so well how to put on--

‘All right. I’M going. If you funk it you’d better cut along home and
ask your nurses to put you to bed.’ So then, of course, they agreed
to go. Oswald went first with the candle. It was not comfortable; the
architect of that dark subterranean passage had not imagined anyone
would ever be brave enough to lead a band of beavers into its inky
recesses, or he would have built it high enough to stand upright in. A

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