Five of Us —

and Madeline

BY

Edith Nesbit

About this Ebook

Five of Us –

and Madeline

By

Edith Nesbit

(1858–1924)

With a glossary for young readers.

Some contents first published ca. 1907~1912. Published in book form 1925.

This ebook was created by E.C.M. for MobileRead.com, November 2015.

This ebook may be freely distributed for non-commercial purposes.

The text of this book is in the public domain in countries where copyright is “Life+90” or less.

Edith Nesbit Bland, English author and poet, published approximately 40 books for children under the name of E. Nesbit. Her innovative body of work influenced many subsequent fantasy writers. She also wrote for adults, publishing about a dozen novels and countless short stories.

* * * *

This is Nesbit’s final book, edited and published the year after her death. It is highly reminiscent of the Bastable series – we again have a rather self-important boy, Clifford, narrating the adventures and misadventures of himself, his four siblings, and the detested Cousin Madeline. Young readers who loved Oswald Bastable, and who have less critical demands about story arcs and consistency, will enjoy this book.

“Five of Us” is considered by many critics to be Nesbit’s weakest work. But perhaps it should be considered as a collection of short stories or vignettes, rather than a novel.

* * * *

Notes of possible interest: Several episodes can be found in magazine archives. Stories that became Chapters 6, 8, 9, 10 appeared in Pall Mall Magazine 1907 ~ 1909; and in late 1912 The Strand Magazine published “The Sleuth Worm” (see Chapter 5), which was not a “Clifford” story (the hero was “Leonard Surtees”). The style of Chapter 3 makes it seem likely that it also was not born as a “Clifford” story. That those stories were allowed to languish for more than a decade could indicate that Nesbit had no intention of publishing them as a book.

Italics, punctuation, and diacritics have been formatted; some spelling and punctuation modernized and standardized. Chapter heads are cross-linked to in-line Table of Contents. A glossary for young readers has been added, annotating some terms no longer in general use, or in use primarily in the UK.

Due to copyright restrictions, illustrations were omitted.

Embedded fonts used: “Amita” by Eduardo Tunni and Brian Bonislawsky, “Fontin SmallCaps” by Jos Buivenga. Fonts are redistributable.

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Contents

FIVE OF US – AND MADELINE

Titlepage

About This Ebook

The Stories:

1 – The Doll’s House

2 – The Young Detective

3 – Thomas Lee’s Jack

4 – Running Away

5 – The Sleuth Worm

6 – The Coming Of Madeline

7 – The Madness Of Madeline

8 – The Mysterious House In The Wood

9 –The Dwellers

10 – The Criminals

Glossary

Five of Us —

and Madeline

CHAPTER ONE.

The Doll’s House

When we were quite little something happened to us. It changed our lives, as books say. It was as though a wicked magician had waved a wand and not suddenly, as in most magic, but in a gradual and much more terrible way, everything changed.

Father was changed from a rich man to a poor one, and Mother was changed from a darling who wore lovely new dresses and drove in a car and was always gay and loving with us, to a darling who was very ill and could not be gay with us at all – nervous breakdown the doctor called it, and I heard him say to Father that it was only to be expected after such a shock and the altered circumstances and all. I suppose he meant us being poor. We ourselves were changed from children who went to the best sort of schools into children who had to be taught at home by a sort of relation called Miss Knox. She wasn’t a real relation like an aunt or a cousin, but something much further off than that. Even Father always called her Miss Knox. We didn’t like her, and it couldn’t be expected of us to, because our parents didn’t really, though Mother tried. She said Miss Knox had seen better days and that we must be kind to her. We try to, but we cannot like her whatever she may have seen. We have seen better days ourselves too, but it hasn’t made us like Miss Knox – at least not yet. I should say, myself, that the fairest sights were thrown away on Miss Knox. I once saw an inn on the Sevenoaks road that was called the Baldfaced Stag, and the painted sign hangs out in front, the baldest-faced stag you ever saw. Miss Knox is like that to look at. She always put everyone right, even Mother. And as for us, she seems to contradict every single thing we say. She always knows best.

The worst of it was, we had to live with her, for Father went away to Dominica, to ‘restore our fallen fortunes,’ he said, and Aunt Emma took Mother to the South of France to make her well again in the sun. Aunt Emma lent her house for us and Miss Knox to live in, until things were more settled.

There are five of us – and Madeline. Only Madeline came later, and you’ll hear all about that in another story. She is but a mere cousin and not really one of us and not a bit like us either.

Our names are Clifford – which is me – Martin, Olive, Alan and Carlotta. I never can see that it is any use telling people’s names if you don’t at once tell what they are like. But the finest authors do it – so I suppose it is right.

Carlotta was almost a baby when we descended into poverty and had to live with Miss Knox. She wasn’t quite five years old and was young even for that, because Mother said we all grew up too fast and she must keep one of us to cuddle. So she encouraged Carlotta to be a baby and did everything for her, herself, and called her Carlie. Carlie had always slept in Mother’s room, and so it was really worse for her than for us when Mother and Father went away and she had to sleep with Miss Knox instead. She cried and cried and, really, I can’t blame the poor kid. Mother told us before she went away to remember how little Carlie was and to try to make up to her and not leave her out of our play. We did try, but it was awfully difficult because she was too little to understand lots of things. She couldn’t even understand about our being poor, and was always wanting things we couldn’t have.

‘It’s fairly beastly Daddy and Mother going away,’ said Olive. ‘But they’ll come back.’

‘That’s all very well,’ said Clifford, ‘but we have got to have Miss Knox all over us.’

‘I don’t mind that so much,’ said Martin; ‘it will be fun escaping from her clutches. It’s Aunt Emma’s house I mind. That’s what will be so awful.’

‘It’s not the being poor,’ I said; ‘I don’t care about money. It’s the things.’

‘But they won’t sell everything,’ said Olive. ‘I looked at the book of the sale, and there’s not half the things there.’

‘There’s a second volume,’ said Alan. ‘Mother told me. They take two days to sell the things, and there’s a list of things for each day.’

We were camping on a heap of mattresses in the hall. No one could have hated our things being sold more than we did, but it was not bad fun in a way, having everything turned out, and having mattresses in the hall.

Also the gardener was so changed from his old self that he seemed to feel quite differently about peaches and grapes since what everyone called the smash. He surprisingly let us pick as many as we liked. We had a waste-paper basket of them now in our midst. I remember the juice ran down on to the blue-room mattress and made sticky streaks that wouldn’t come off when Carlie licked them, a thing I was much too old to have done myself.

And nurse herself was so changed that she never said a word even about the peach-stones that we happened to leave in the holey parts of the mattress where the leather discs are.

‘Were all our things in the list?’ Olive asked.

‘Not our clothes,’ said Alan.

‘Bother clothes,’ said Olive; ‘who cares about clothes? Our dolls and toys and things, I mean.’

‘Not the little things,’ said Martin, in a tone that sent Carlie off to measure her best doll.

‘They’re not really selling our things?’ I said, feeling hot all over.

‘Oh, aren’t they!’ said Martin. ‘Mike’s in the second list,’ he added, trying to look as if he didn’t care. Mike was our donkey. ‘And the rocking-horse and the big ninepins and the croquet and the tennis things and the big chest of wooden bricks Daddy made for us – not the terra-cotta bricks,’ he added, as though the terra-cotta bricks mattered one way or another.

I didn’t see why the terra-cotta bricks should be spared to us, and said so.

‘Don’t you see?’ Martin explained carefully. ‘It’s the bigness of things that counts. Aunt Emma’s house is too small for donkeys and rocking-horses. Why, it’s more like a doll’s house.’

Olive sat up very straight and the half-eaten peach dribbled from her nerveless fingers.

‘The doll’s house,’ she said – ‘our doll’s house. Don’t say there won’t be room at Aunt Emma’s for the doll’s house.’

But Martin had to say it, and Olive threw herself face down on the mattress all juicy as she was, and did not even try not to cry.

I myself was rather upset, though I am a boy and even then was getting too old for dolls’ houses.

‘I don’t know how Carlie will bear it,’ Olive sobbed. ‘I believe Carlie will go mad – I really do.’

‘Carlie’ll have to bear it the same as the rest of us,’ I said; ‘and it’s worse for us because we’ve had it longer than she has.’

‘The younger you are the more things hurt,’ said Olive through her sniffs. ‘I almost wish we’d never had the doll’s house.’

‘I wish we’d got the pocket-money we’ve spent buying things for it,’ said I, not very nobly perhaps.

‘I wish – oh, what’s the use of wishing?’ said Martin in gloom. ‘And come to that, what’s the use of blubbing, Olive? It only makes things worse.’

‘Nothing can’t make anything worse,’ sobbed Olive from despair’s deep depths.

‘That’s bad grammar,’ said Clifford, thoughtless, but not really meaning to be unkind.

‘I know it is, and I like it,’ said Olive, howling more than ever.

‘Men must work and women must weep,’ said Clifford, ‘though I never could see why. Suppose we go and pack the things they’ve spared – shall we, Martin?’

So we went.

Clifford does not wish to brag of a kind action, and if one of the boys did pat the shoulder of his weeping sister as he passed and said, ‘Buck up, old girl,’ it was only a brother’s duty and nothing to be proud about, though some would not have done it.

Aunt Emma’s house was small and new and mimsy [40], with very little garden and no stable at all. But it was near Blackheath and in an open part with fields and trees all round.

Sometimes when boys’ fathers lose their money they have to go and live in wretched sunless slums with absolutely indignant relatives, I believe, and beg for their bread till someone adopts them, and the book ends with ponies and cricket-bats [16]  and a high rate of pocket-money almost dreamlike.

Miss Knox was rather better than we expected, too. I think, myself, that she had had some instructions from Father, but Olive thought that perhaps our sorrows had changed her heart and she would never be the same Knox again, but it wasn’t so, as you will see later in another story.

Anyway she let us have a room to ourselves to play in, which we’d never expected of her. The room had only tables and chairs, but it was our own to mess about in and no fuss even if you brought up silkworms or brought in newts. Also it had a large cupboard with a window where you could put things away if you wanted to, and the cupboard had a lock, and Miss Knox, with rare gentlemanly feeling, gave us the key.

It was nowhere near our old home, so we were spared seeing strangers playing tennis on our old ground or drawing different curtains across our windows.

‘We’ve got a good few things still,’ I said, when we had finished unpacking; ‘chess, draughts [18], spillikins [47], Happy Families [30], bats and stumps [03], the clockwork engine, all our books. . .’

‘And all the dear dollies,’ said Carlie.

‘I’d give them all for the doll’s house,’ said Olive; ‘I don’t know what you mean about not having room for it. It could have got in here as easy as easy. Our beautiful doll’s house…’

‘That was it,’ said Martin; ‘it was too beautiful. Somebody said it ought to have been in a museum, it was so beautiful – and someone paid twenty-five pounds for it at the sale. Aunt Emma told me.’

‘Know the blighter’s name?’ I asked. And Martin said:

‘It wasn’t a blighter. It was an old frump called Miss Peebles,’ he added, because we boys have all been taught to be chivalrous to women. ‘She lives somewhere near here. No children. No earthly excuse for her buying it.’

‘I’m glad it’s near,’ said Olive dreamily. ‘Perhaps she’ll ask us to tea someday and we shall meet it again with rapturous hearts.’

‘I couldn’t stand that,’ said Clifford, Martin and Alan together; and Clifford, which is me, added, ‘I wouldn’t go to tea if she asked me. I’d much rather someone at the North Pole had bought it.’ And all but Carlie thought so too.

I expect you think it was silly and babyish of us boys to bother about an old doll’s house. You are wrong. This was not a common doll’s house like yours – I mean like some people’s. It was made of some kind of grey foreign wood, and the outside of it all round was chiselled to look like stones; and the roof was jarrah wood [34], which is red, and looked like dark tiles, and it had chimneys you could look down – not just pretence. It had two staircases of polished mahogany with velvet ribbon for carpets and tiny stair-rods made out of blanket-pins. The doors were mahogany too, properly panelled and polished, with ivory door-knobs, and all the doors opened. The drawing-room mantelpiece was satin-wood, the dining-room one ebony – the windows were made to open and shut, and the front door had three steps up to it. It was given to an ancestor of ours by a Prince to whom he had been Equerry.[21]

It was the way it was made and the smooth inlaid floors and little corner cupboards and shelves and window-ledges that we boys liked. But of course the girls liked the furniture and the silk curtains and brocade carpets and the little wooden four-post beds with curtains and flounces, and all the little dolls. Papa and Mamma and all the children and a baby and a nurse and the cook. And the kitchen was all smooth white wood – little plate-racks, and teeny Windsor chairs, and – But let me get on with the story.

We needn’t have bothered about Miss Peebles asking us to tea. She didn’t. She went away to stay with a cousin and her house was shut up until she came back.

When we heard of this we looked at each other, and when we were alone it did not need Carlie to say, ‘Couldn’t we go and peep into Miss Peebles’ windows and perhaps we should see IT?’ For of course we all meant to.

Well, we went. Miss Peebles’ garden had a high brick wall round it and the gates were padlocked, both the one leading to the road and the one leading to the field. But we knew something about gates, and one day we managed to lift the field one off its hinges, at that convenient time of the day when exhausted nature demands its Tea.

And we crept up like Iroquois under cover of the rhododendrons and got to the house and looked in at the windows. Clifford had to lift Carlie up – she was too little to see in. The first room was just a store-room – jars and crocks and tins, and the window barred too. The next was the kitchen – bright tins and white wood.

‘Just like the darling doll’s house,’ said Carlie.

‘And look at the dish-covers,’ said Olive; ‘they’re just like ours…’

But the third – it’s always the third, you will have noticed that. The third was a sort of lumber-room with boxes and trunks and big old pictures leaning against the wall, and old fireguards and bundles done up in sheets and partly broken chairs and a clock that didn’t go and screens that had seen better days, like Miss Knox. And. . .

‘Oh, look, look – it is!’ cried Carlie. And indeed it was.

There, neglected and unloved and dusty, in the midst of that scene of desolation, stood our doll’s house. And its back was towards us – its beautiful back with the grey stones and the windows, and the balcony painted green – for our doll’s house would have scorned to be less handsome at the back than the front as too many houses are – not to mention waistcoats.

I will not seek to tell our inside feelings; but I will just tell you that our gentle Olive said:

‘We could easily break the glass and get in and play with it. Let’s!’

And Carlie burst into tears and tried to do the breaking then and there with her fat fists.

We almost had to drag them from the spot, and that night Olive told us Carlie had talked about it in her sleep, and the next day the kid was quite ill.

Martin and I decided that we would not take the little ones again. They cannot lift gates. We did not say we would go again ourselves, but we were both thinking. Please remember from now till the end of this story that we were very young when all this happened – it is more than two years ago. We should not do such things at this date. We know better. At least I think so.

What we were both thinking came out when Martin said to me next night in our room, struggling with his collar stud:

‘No one uses it.’

I said, ‘It’s all dusty.’

‘She can’t want it,’ said Martin; ‘she just bought it for spite. She lives only to give pain to others. There are people like that, I believe.’

‘Look at Nero,’ I said, ‘and Caligula.’

‘And Herod. And the Spanish Inquisition,’ said Martin, conquering the stud.

‘It’s a beastly shame,’ said Clifford.

‘It ought to be put down by Parliament,’ said Martin. ‘Cliff,’ he went on in a voice like Guy Fawkes, ‘when Parliament doesn’t do what it ought to, the people take the law into their own hands.’

‘Like Charles the First,’ said I. ‘Or the French Revolution; but it’s much too heavy for us to lift, and we’ve nowhere to put it even if we could lift it.’

Martin told me not to be a duffer, [19]   and I said something and then he said something else, and I wasn’t going to stand that and he wasn’t either, and the gas was turned out ere peace was restored.

But in the dark Martin said, ‘Not the house, you silly cuckoo – no, I’m not beginning again – I mean – don’t you see? Carlie’s so unhappy about it all – and Mother said we mustn’t let her be unhappy – so perhaps it’s our duty. And I don’t suppose the Peebles woman will look inside it from year’s end to year’s end. The little things. If we took our attaché cases? And one of us could keep cave! [11]  Very early in the morning would be best – before even the milk. We could keep everything in our lock-up cupboard. The girls could play with them secretly. It would be like conspirators. And that window was only latched, you know.’

‘I know it was,’ I said, ‘and with a dinner-knife. . .’

‘Exactly,’ said Martin.

‘We might begin with the Derbyshire marble table from Castleton. I love the feel of that.’

‘And the eight-day clock.’

‘And the secretaire bookcase. I like the way those doors fit and its good little brass hinges.’

I think we had made a complete invention, as they call it, of all the furniture of the doll’s house before we got to sleep, very late indeed.

And not the next morning, because we happened not to wake, but the morning after we got up and crept down with our boots in our hands and went out, and along to Miss Peebles’ house.

We did not meet a soul. Everything was quite quiet and wetter than you would believe, with dew. The window yielded to our burglar’s jemmy [35]  – I mean the dinner-knife – and we got in.

You have no idea how loud our boots sounded on the floor of that lumber-room. We got the doll’s house door open in a great hurry and filled the attaché cases with the very best of the furniture.

‘But suppose she does open it,’ said I; ‘suppose she really bought it to play with? Louis the Eleventh had lead images, and Charles the Something or Other of France had toys, I believe.’

We quickly put all the things back.

‘I don’t believe she does want to play with them. Anyway, she can’t want them all,’ said Martin. ‘Look here, let’s be fair.’

So we only filled one of the cases. Then with our boots on we got our legs over the window ledge, got the window shut, and were just off when we heard the front gate creak. A beastly early worm of a gardener was coming in. He didn’t see us. In a moment we were round the corner.

You wouldn’t believe that grass would make a noise when you walk on it. But it does – if you don’t want it to. We gained the cover of the rhododendrons and I glanced round. There was no pursuit. My heart felt like a steam-hammer. And the rhododendrons shrieked like trees in tropical forests during monsoons in books of travel. The gate-hinges went home with a report like a hundred-ton gun – and we could not help running under cover of the hedge till we got to the road. Even then we went very fast.

We got in unobserved and cleaned our boots with our sponge. Then I said:

‘I say – I suppose it isn’t really stealing, is it?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Martin; ‘I didn’t think it was until I saw that gardener, and then I didn’t feel so beastly sure.’

‘Let’s reason it out,’ said Clifford, who has always been noted for his logical mind.

‘The things were ours. We’ve taken them back. She didn’t want them. We do. No. It isn’t stealing. It’s more like Robin Hood, taking from the rich to give to the poor.’

‘But we’re not the poor,’ said Martin.

‘Yes, we are,’ I said, ‘compared with what we used to be. And anyway Carlie is. Poor Carlie! look how she cried. And Mother said we were not to let her cry. It’s Robin Hood we’ve been playing at, and not Bill Sikes. We must get that clear in our logical minds, Martin, or we shall have all sorts of bother explaining to the girls.’ We did get it clear in our minds, at least Clifford did, but we didn’t have any bother with the girls. Olive said afterwards she thought we knew what was right; at any rate we were always saying we knew.

But at the time the girls were almost speechless with joy. They fingered and stroked the little chairs and tables, and I believe Carlie kissed the little glass chandelier and the knife-box and churn.

We had to use force to get them away from the cupboard for meals.

Having those things seemed to make up to the girls for all our sorrows. When I saw how happy they were I could not be sorry that we had acted like Robin Hood. But at the same time I did wish that I had not felt quite so like Bill Sikes when we were getting away from that gardener.

Martin said that life was a difficult thing, and the greatest tragedies came not from the conflict of right and wrong but from the conflict of opposing duties. He liked saying this: he got it from our Uncle Jim, who is a clergyman.

‘You see,’ said Martin, ‘even if it was our duty to the Peebles not to take our things out of her lumber-room, we had our duty to our little sisters.’

And I quite saw that, but I made up my mind not to think about it more than I could help, and to try to fit up the shelves of the cupboard to be as like the doll’s house as possible.

This was done – and when I felt the Bill Sikes feeling coming on I used to get the better of it by hating Miss Peebles as hard as I could. Martin has told me since that he did too. The girls, poor butterflies, sported gaily, unpreyed on by such thoughts as ours.

Then quite suddenly. . .

I really do not know how to tell this part of the story. It is too perfectly awful. You cannot possibly guess what is coming any more than we did. Prepare yourself for a frightful shock. No one prepared us. We had to bear it as best we could. What I am going to say was the limit. No one could have expected it. It was this.

We came in one day from a long walk, and there, blocking up Aunt Emma’s little hall, was our doll’s house! Also Miss Knox was smiling. Also a strange lady, quite kind-looking, and smiling partly. Partly she looked more like crying. It was Miss Peebles. She had only bought the doll’s house to give it to us.

‘And I’m sorry you’ve been so long without it, my dears,’ she said; ‘but my cousin was so ill I had to go to her, and I didn’t want to send it to you till I’d put new dresses on the dolls and added a few little things that were mine when I was a little girl.’

They were lovely things that she had added, too; the same beautiful kind of things as ours. Little pictures with real gilt frames and chairs made out of the white ends of peacocks’ feathers – like ivory, and vases of flowers for mantelpieces, under glass cases, and a whole set of copper saucepans and kettles. But I have not the heart to go on.

We did not say anything then except the things you have to say, like ‘Thank you very much indeed,’ and ‘How kind of you!’

And the doll’s house was got up into our room by that gardener and another man, and the things in the cupboard felt to me more like Bluebeard’s wives than doll’s house furniture.

When we were alone the girls cried and said they wished we hadn’t. This is girl’s gratitude, and we said so, though of course we wished it too. But there was no row. [45]  We were too crushed.

Martin and I knew what we had to do, and of course we went down to Miss Peebles and did it. She was very decent about it.

Of course that made us feel worse. We did not try to explain. We only owned to our horrid crime, for such it now appeared.

Though quite old – nearly forty, I believe – Miss Peebles has not lost the faculty of her mind. She said, and quite out of her own head, without our having said anything in the least like it, ‘I expect you felt like Robin Hood. . . at first.’

Think what we felt to know that we had stolen furniture and clocks and chandeliers from one who could understand everything like that.

Miss Peebles is a woman in a million – a trump of the first water. We know her quite well now, and though she has actually played with the doll’s house with the girls, she has never talked about our fatal act – not even to us.

CHAPTER TWO.

The Young Detective

This happened when we went to stay with our Uncle John. At least. . . but you will see!

It was the first time that Martin and I had been allowed to travel quite by ourselves. We were still in the custody of Miss Knox in Aunt Emma’s house. Miss Knox always thinks we are much younger that we are: and of course we aren’t.

Aunt Kitty is Uncle John’s bride and quite a decent sort, in some ways, but I think grown-up people ought to be taught to write plainly. We have to, and why shouldn’t they? I should like to know what would happen to a chap at school if he showed up with an ekker [20]  with writing like Aunt Kitty’s. An insane spider escaping from an inky death could hardly have done worse.

However, Miss Knox puzzled the letter out, and read it aloud to us: and when she had gone on for several long, thin pages about mountains and lakes and fjords and the people they had met at hotels, the letter said:

What I am really writing to tell you is that we have taken a house at Lymchurch for the rest of the summer and we shall be very glad to have Clifford and Martin down for a month. They can travel down alone quite well, they are quite old enough to be trusted. [Aunt Kitty is quite sound in many ways.] I am sorry we cannot have all the children, but we have only room for two, and they must share a room. They can come by the 5 o’clock train on the 17th and we will meet them at the station. The address is The Beeches, Lymchurch.

This is what Miss Knox read out to us at breakfast, and Martin was so excited at the idea of getting away from Aunt Emma’s mimsy house for a month, that he upset his tea, but Clifford, who is made of sterner stuff, went on with his breakfast and had one more piece of toast than usual, just to show he was too old to lose his head about going to the seaside. The little ones were terribly disappointed at having to stay behind with Miss Knox – it was rotten luck, I must say – and Carlie burst into tears as usual.

The ladies of the house were at once plunged in clothes, darning and buttons and things like that. We men had other tasks, overhauling our fishing-rods, oiling our bats and seeing to our hooks and lines. I do not take much interest in clothes. Whatever do they matter? I do like plenty of handkerchiefs; they are useful for so many different things.

We had far more luggage than I should have taken if it had been left to me – and when we were getting into the cab Eliza, she was the general and the other ‘lady of the house,’ came tearing after us with a little extra dispatch case.

‘Their things for the night, mum,’ she screamed at Miss Knox; ‘their nighties and comb and brush,’ she shrieked, right out loud like that for everyone to hear. The very cabman grinned – I saw him.

That was the first thing and, considering we have worn pyjamas for years, it was pretty rotten, I do think, and I had hardly got over it when we reached the station.

Miss Knox let me take the tickets, but she stood beside me to see that I didn’t ask for one to Manchester, or Rio, or Aden, I suppose.

Then we got into the train, and while she was enjoying a final fuss with the luggage I said to Martin:

‘In two more minutes we shall be free,’ and the next moment she came back to the carriage and said, ‘I have a good mind to go with you after all. I don’t feel quite easy in my mind letting you go alone like this,’ and our hearts sank to our boots. But the engine shrieked encouragingly and the porter slammed the door, and Miss Knox is not the sort of person to travel without a ticket, and the train moved off and we were saved.

Our heroes were well provided with cash, so they could buy buns and butterscotch and bananas at any station that had any, and the journey passed like a lovely dream. Being on our complete own was what made it so dreamlike.

‘I wonder if they’ll meet us with a motor or an open carriage with horses,’ said Martin.

‘An aeroplane, [01]  perhaps,’ said Clifford, but I did not really think so. I am not a baby. I knew there are some things it is no use wishing for.

But when we got to Hythe station, which Lymchurch is obliged to use, not having a station of its own, we found that our kind aunt and uncle had not met us with anything, not even a wheelbarrow or a scooter. In fact, they had not met us at all By the time we were quite sure of this all the other carts and carriages and motors had gone and with them our last chance of getting even a lift on our way.

‘We shall have to walk it,’ said Clifford, and it was he who thought of asking the station-master to take care of our box and portmanteau until they were sent for. We thought we could carry the dispatch case, but it got heavier and heavier as we went along, and Clifford carried it most of the way, because Martin is my younger brother and smaller than me, and I know my duty. But I do not brag about this.

Well, we got through the town, only pausing to buy some jam puffs and strawberries and shortbread and bullseyes [07] , which we ate when we came to the canal, so as not to have to carry them – in sticky bags, I mean. It was green and shady by the canal, but the road to Lymchurch was white-hot dust.

Lymchurch is every bit of five miles from the town. The road runs along by the side of the sea-wall and on the other side of this is the sea. We could hear its voice talking to itself and that was all the company we had. We met a few people on bicycles and a few motors, but on the whole it was a most abandoned road. We went on and on like the woodcutter’s sons when they go out to seek their fortunes, and we were as thirsty as deserts, not having had the sense to buy ginger-beer [26]  in Hythe, as, of course, more experienced travellers would have done, instead of bullseyes, which only make you worse.

We sat down several times on the top of the sea-wall and gazed at the sea, and wished it was ginger-beer, which it looked rather like, frothing up on the sand in little creamy waves. But of course it was not, and looking at it only seemed to make us thirstier.

And then came our first bit of luck since we left the station. A man with a cart with a mangle [39]  in it came by and offered us a lift. We were very glad to get in, though the mangle was cornery, and bit us when the cart bumped.

We told him we were going to The Beeches, and he said:

‘First house this side the village. I’ll drop you there. Afore I drops the mangle.’ And he did.

The Beeches stands alone in a field. It is quite a large house. We heard afterwards that it called itself a bungalow [08]. Where we lived it would be called a villa [52]. It has a paling [43]  round a bit of ground that tries to be a garden. No trees. It is red, and had green shutters that fasten outside. A brass plate on the door said ‘Knock and ring.’ We couldn’t ring because there wasn’t any bell. There wasn’t any knocker either, but luckily you can knock without a knocker, so we did, both with hands and feet. Feet make most noise, being booted; besides not hurting as hands do when you get despairing and knock as hard as you can.

But however hard we knocked it made no difference. And long before we stopped knocking we knew there was no one at home. If you knock on an empty house the knocking sounds different somehow.

It was plain that our aunt and uncle were out. And the door was locked. We were much too hot to go on to the village and ask people. We sat down on the front door-step to wait till they came in. The door-step was in the shade, but we were frightfully thirsty. Martin said he believed he could drink someone’s blood, and I said it would be hot and beastly even if we had anybody’s blood to drink.

We went round presently to see if the back door was open. Of course it wasn’t. So then we unbuttoned the shutters to see if we could get in by a window – but all was as tight as stuck-down envelopes. So we did the shutters up again. And then we found a little window and it was open behind its little shutter, and Martin gave me a leg-up and I got in, all among cold chicken and cheese and butter and lard and crocks and jars and tins, for it was the larder. [36]  I only knocked down one jar, and that was merely salt. Then I was in the kitchen. Our hero found the back door and let in his little brother: then he went round and buttoned up the pantry window. You know what grown-ups are like, they tell you always to leave everything just as you find it, and I thought it was as well to begin our visit without words if possible.

Then we locked the back door again and looked searchingly for the water-tap. But there wasn’t one – we found out afterwards that your water is brought every day from a special pump in the village and you use rain-water and the sea for washing and baths – and I was just looking in the kettle to see if any water had been left in it when Martin found the ginger-beer, bottles and bottles of it, on the pantry floor. So then we were all right.

The kitchen was not entirely without crockery and glass, though nothing like so much as we have at home – but we found two tumblers. I shall never forget that ginger-beer. We had three bottles between us – one instantly and more by degrees as we felt we needed it. We kept listening for the approaching footsteps of our uncle and aunt, so that we might run out as soon as we heard them coming and say, ‘How are you? And we hope you don’t mind our having used some of the G.B., but we were so thirsty.’

But they did not come. And then we found we were hungry. Perhaps it was the sight of the things in the larder; but really we hadn’t had anything serious to eat for ages, and the little things we had had on the way, strawberries and jam puffs and so on, only seemed to have made us hungrier, if you understand what I mean. So we had supper. Not in a messy, untidy way. Oh, no!

We spread a cloth as we had been shown by our kind relatives and we got the chicken and some cold ham and bread and butter, and knives and forks and plates and everything that grown-ups think needful. (I once heard a man talk about the Simple Life. I think I should like that – no tablecloth and eat with your fingers.) I had never carved a fowl before, but it is quite easy if you pull at the ends of the legs and wings with your hands. It was delicious. So was the gooseberry pie. And so was everything.

When we could not eat any more we cleared everything away; no one could blame us for not washing up because we couldn’t find any water. Even the cleanest person would think twice before washing up in such a valuable fluid as G.B.

Then we went all over the house. There were several rooms, and we wondered why Aunt Kitty had said that she hadn’t room for the others, because there seemed to be heaps. Clifford thought that probably she and Uncle couldn’t be bothered with small kids, and that it was just a polite way of putting it, like you have to, not to hurt people’s feelings. The house was awfully tidy except for some men’s clothes in two of the bedrooms. No ladies’ hats or scent-bottles; so we saw that our Aunt Kitty must be one of those wonderful people who never forget to put things away.

When we had looked at everything we went to the landing window to look out, like Bluebeard’s wife’s sister, and see if we could see our uncle and aunt coming. And they were not. In fact, nobody was. And it was getting evening, and dusky indoors, though still daylight outside. And we got wondering whether we had somehow missed our relations at the station and whether they were still there waiting for us, and wondering whether they would wait there all night and whether we should be able to find any water for tea in the morning or whether we should have to have ginger-beer for breakfast. Martin thought it would be rather nice, but I thought it would be too puffy to go with boiled eggs.

And then we saw two men coming across the field towards the house.

‘Don’t let them see you,’ said Clifford, pulling his young brother away from the window; ‘let them “knock and ring” if they can. We don’t want to go down and have a lot of jaw about who we are and where our relations are and when they’ll be back, and perhaps have to remember messages. Let them ring and knock.’

So we let them. But they didn’t. I could see them with one eye through the curtain and I noticed that when they got to the gate the men came up the garden path very quickly and into the porch – but they didn’t knock or ring or kick or thump. No, with silent secretness they took other means to get in. Clifford heard the jingle of what he was certain were skeleton keys. And in one flash he saw it all. These men were not visitors. They were Burglars!

They shut the door very gently, and with noiseless tread advanced into the house. Clifford had often thought of what he should do if there ever were burglars. He now acted with great firmness. He put his hand suddenly over his young brother’s mouth and whispered, ‘Don’t scream, and I’ll tell you something. No – don’t wriggle, you duffer – I’m not playing. Those men are burglars. Don’t make a sound. We will circumnavigate them somehow.’

•      •      •      •

Clifford dragged his brother kindly but firmly into one of the bedrooms: fortunately there were carpets. He breathed more freely when the bedroom door was shut and locked – the locks in that house were well oiled, I will say – because if the burglars had come upstairs a locked door would have been some protection. Then he said:

‘We must take our boots in our hands and creep down and out by the front door and go and tell the police – or the people next door. Off with your boots.’

So Martin offed. Of course his bootlace got in a knot, but Clifford was ready with the knife, as a detective should be when required.

Still no sound came from below. ‘The burglars are busy with their fell work,’ Clifford whispered; ‘don’t be frightened, Martin,’ he added nobly, ‘I’ll take care of you.’

‘I’m not,’ said Martin; ‘but what will you do if we meet them going out?’

‘We shan’t,’ said Clifford, though he felt none too jolly sure of this. ‘They won’t be in the passage. There’s nothing to burgle there, but the hat pegs and the umbrella-stand. Anyway if we do meet them it will be them to bolt, not us. We’re in our own house.’

So spoke our hero, and I am sure you will agree that it was bravely said. But inside his mind what he was feeling most was that he wanted to get out of that house.

We undid the bedroom door and went on to the landing holding our boots. We crept to the top of the stairs and listened. I could hear the voices of the burglars in the kitchen, but to make sure I lay at full length on the landing, very sleuthlike, and looked down. The hall was empty.

‘I’ll go first,’ said our hero; and he did. He got to the bottom of the stairs and stood holding his breath, quite close to the kitchen where the burglars were, and making all the signs he could to Martin to come on; but Martin seemed as if he did not like to.

‘Come on, you silly cuckoo,’ said Clifford, moving his lips but without sound.

Martin understood and began to come down slowly. It’s no use his saying he wasn’t frightened; he must simply have been shaking all over with it. For before he had come down four steps his boots slipped from his trembling, nerveless fingers and came bounding down the stairs like thunderbolts.

‘Whatever’s that?’ cried a voice in the kitchen – and there was a moment’s pause while the burglars listened. You know how people do, to see if the noise will go on.

That moment, short as it was, was enough for our young detective. In that moment the great idea came to him. He saw that the burglars had not opened the shutters – being the Persian kind they let in quite enough light of a soft green sort.

Quick as thought our hero banged the kitchen door and locked it. He had noticed that the key was on the outside. See what it is to have a sleuth-hound’s eye!

‘There,’ I said, ‘that’s done it. Put your boots on, quick – here’s the other – never mind if the lace is broken – tie it anyhow.’

The imprisoned burglars were now hammering at the door and shouting. But all was in vain. They were nabbed and they knew it. And our hero knew it too!

I don’t think I ever had a prouder moment than when I tapped at the kitchen door and said in deep, growling tones:

‘Quiet, sir; down, dog, down.’ I did not mean to say it; it just came to me. It is what is called genius. They stopped their hammering and called out:

‘Who’s there?’ they shouted.

‘Detectives,’ I said, and turned coldly away. How glad we were that we had fastened all the outside shutters again, so as to ‘leave things as we found them.’ Always do what you are told; it quite often turns up trumps in ways you don’t expect.

Our next act was to go to the village to try to find someone to surprise and delight them with the wonderful story of our detective act.

We got on to the road and went towards the village – and by a strange fate the first people we met were our uncle and his bride.

‘Hullo,’ said our uncle, ‘you’re a nice lot!’ and ‘What train did you come by?’ asked the new aunt.

‘The one you said in the letter, Aunt Kitty,’ said Clifford, always polite to ladies. ‘The five o’clock. But, Uncle John—’

‘I said seven,’ said Aunt Kitty. (It turned out later that she had, but it looked just like a five, and she had to own it.)

‘But where have you been all this time? Aren’t you starving?’ said our kind aunt.

‘We’ve had some chicken and ginger-beer,’ said Martin.

‘’Pon my word, you’ve done yourselves well,’ said Uncle John, and he kept going on like that.

‘Yes, thank you, we have,’ said Martin; and if you’ll believe me Clifford couldn’t get a word in for his uncle’s silly chaff. It is rude to interrupt, but he had to do it. Heroes are always allowed to.

‘Stop,’ he said suddenly. ‘Listen, Uncle – I’ve something to tell you. While you’ve been away your house had been burgled.

‘Nonsense,’ said Uncle.

‘You don’t know everything,’ said Martin, which was rude of the boy, but Clifford felt it was excusable in the circs., though he wouldn’t have done it himself.

‘No – you really don’t,’ said Clifford, earnestly, in order to cover up the rudeness. ‘Your house was burgled, but we were on the spot. Nothing has been taken. We stalked the burglars barefooted and we’ve got them safe locked up in the kitchen. And now, please, what about fetching the police?’

‘But. . .’ said Aunt Kitty.

‘I don’t wonder you’re surprised,’ said our hero, ‘but it’s true. Alone, we did it.’

I own I did think there might have been a word or two of praise here for our gallant presence of mind (though it was all Clifford’s really, but of course he would not have explained this for the world). But no! Not a word of praise. Only more questions. ‘Burglars – where?’

‘What do you mean – burglars?’

‘Burglars – there in your house. Locked up. In the kitchen,’ said Clifford very slowly and carefully and very loud, like you speak to deaf people. ‘In your house, over there,’ and he pointed to The Beeches which we had just left.

‘There?’ cried our uncle. ‘Great Scott, boy! That’s not our house. What on earth have you done? Our house is The Birches.’ (Aunt Kitty’s handwriting again. What a lesson for her! )

Uncle John said afterwards that it ought to be a lesson to me not to be too jolly clever by half – but I don’t agree.

I wish to draw a veil over our return to The Beeches. It is no use my telling you what the gallant young detective felt when he found himself covered with contempt instead of the glory he deserved. I think I could have borne it all bravely if Martin hadn’t put his tongue out at me when the others weren’t looking and whispered ‘Clever!’

We went back to The Beeches and unlocked the kitchen door and set free the now raging burglars. Only it happened that they weren’t burglars but only the people the house belonged to. Of course I had to apologize and own up about the chicken and the ginger-beer. They were quite decent about it. But they never forgot it, and every time they met us they rubbed it in. Our month at Lymchurch would have been quite spoiled if Clifford had not taken the bull by the horns and spoken to one of them, man to man, and asked him to drop it. And then they did.

The whole thing turned out wrong, but Clifford cannot see, to this day, and never will see, that any of it was his fault.

If they had been burglars, and by his brave act he had saved his aunt’s jewels (which might easily have been the case), he would have been acclaimed a hero by everyone and congratulated on his perspicatiousness; and just through an unfortunate accident it was quite the other way. But I cannot see myself that he was any the less a hero for that. Life is often very unfair and enough to stop anyone trying to do a noble action.

CHAPTER THREE.

Thomas Lee’s Jack

After Clifford had fixed it up with the two false burglars not to chaff us any more about that painful incident, Martin and I had a perfectly ripping time at Lymchurch. Aunt Kitty turned out to be a really first-class sort of aunt. There was no fussing about clothes – Martin and I went about in shorts and tennis shirts and with bare legs all the time, even on Sundays. All that luggage Miss Knox had made us take proved to be quite unnecessary, as Clifford had felt at the time: only it is never any use saying so. Grown-ups seem to hate you to be right, and it never makes any difference to anything if you point it out. Clifford has learnt not to do this.

We were allowed to roam about entirely on our own, and no questions about ‘Where had we been?’ or ‘Were we enjoying ourselves?’ and things like that. It is a curious thing that people only ask you if you are enjoying yourselves when you aren’t, but you know you are expected to answer ‘Yes,’ and that makes you enjoy yourselves even less, if possible.

We found it strange that our uncle and his newly-won bride did not seem to want us to go about with them at all, though, of course, we always politely offered to accompany them everywhere.

As long as we were not more than half an hour late for meals nobody said a word, and if we wanted to go on a long expedition to the hills there were always hard-boiled eggs and lettuce and bread-and-butter and shrimps. Bathing was allowed as many times a day as we liked, even right up to bedtime, which is most unusual. If you have never had a holiday like this I don’t think you can imagine it. Martin and I felt jolly sorry for the others, cooped up in Aunt Emma’s bandbox of a house with Miss Knox. At least, we thought they were. But they weren’t. You’ll see about that in another story.

Aunt Kitty never once said after breakfast: ‘Now, what are you two going to do today?’ Not even on the first morning. Everybody just got up and drifted naturally apart, and did what they wanted. I heard that before our uncle married Aunt Kitty she was once a member of the Women’s Freedom League. If it means letting people do as they like and not fussing, it is a pity more ladies don’t join it.

There was always heaps to do in Lymchurch on fine days, and when it was wet, there was Captain Cargill.

Captain Cargill lives in the cottage at the very end of the village on the road to New Romney. His garden-beds are bordered with whitewashed stones, his house is whitewashed, his gate and palings are painted green, and he has a tall flagstaff in his yard with a tin ship on the top that turns round in the wind.

Inside, his house is as neat as a ship’s cabin. There is a lacquered tray with some Chinese teacups on the side-table, and woolwork pictures of sailing-ships in frames on the walls, and the Union Jack all done with little different coloured shells, and a glass rolling-pin from France, and mats made out of ropes, all sorts of jolly patterns.

And over the mantelpiece there is a big glass case with a stuffed dog in it, and a label with gold letters that says ‘Jack Thomas Lee, 1870.’

If you are the rampaging kind of boy who breaks everything he looks at you will never be allowed inside Captain Cargill’s cottage. But if you are the kind of boy who likes to look and listen, like Clifford and Martin were, Captain Cargill will tell you tales about everything.

Shells and mats and feathers and wool work. Whenever you ask a question about anything he has an interesting story to tell.

Martin and I used to go in on wet days, and we always got a story, and some jolly good ones, too. But the best of all was the one about the stuffed dog. So if you ever have the luck to be asked in to the cottage I advise you to point to the glass case and say:

‘What dog was that?’ And then Captain Cargill will tell you this:

‘That was a dog, a real dog, not a china dog, a dog that needed feeding with a spoon, not a dog that buries bones and forgets where he’s put them, but a dog that always knew what tack he was on, and knew a shift of wind without being told.

‘That dog sailed with me on the Thomas Lee for eight years.

‘The Thomas Lee was a bit of a wonder in her time; though her sort is common enough now. She was one of the first iron steamboats built to carry coals to London. She steamed between Sunderland and London, and whether she unloaded her cargo at Wapping, Deadman’s Rock, Greenwich, or the Regent’s Canal, she was the one everyone wanted to look at.

‘For being iron, she was a novelty. All the other colliers then were brigs and schooners – wooden sailing-ships, you know. She was something to be proud of. The crew knew it. And that dog Jack knew it.

‘It’s my belief he knew everything. He knew the north side of the Thames, and he knew the south side of the Thames. And he knew his way home. What’s that? Every dog knows his way home? Ay, maybe, but most dog’s homes are built on dry land, and stays where they’re put. But Jack’s home was a shifting home.

‘When the ship was berthed in London, Jack used to go off for a day or two on his own affairs, but he always came back to the Thomas Lee before the time of sailing – but sometimes it happened that we sailed before our time, and more than once when that happened Jack got left behind.

‘What does he do? Sit down and pipe his eye and make a fuss so that people will notice him and perhaps find him a nice home where he don’t want to be, with a kennel and a chain and a collar and all? Not him! He just keeps quiet and gets on board the next ship that’s going to Sunderland, and turns up on the Thomas Lee, a tide or two after she’s made Sunderland.

‘I’ve known him to do it time and again. And once when there wasn’t a ship bound for Sunderland he got on board a Newcastle collier, and cut across and found his home all right. A ten-mile run across country, and he’d never been there before!

‘How did he know his way? Ah, if I could tell you that I could tell you something. Perhaps he asked the other dogs he met. Anyhow he found his way back to the Thomas Lee right enough. Often we thought we’d lost him, but we never had.

‘Many a landsman would have been glad to have our Jack for a watchdog, but he was a regular sea-dog and loved his ship.

‘Now I’ll tell you an odd thing about that Jack. You must know that when we got to Sunderland the men used to smarten themselves up with paper collars to go ashore, because their homes were there. And one day, just for a bit of fun, the mate put a paper collar on Jack. And after that do you think that dog would go ashore without his paper collar? Not him! In London he didn’t mind about how he looked, and no more did we. But in Sunderland he must be smart, the same as the rest of the crew.

‘And what’s more, the minute we was moored he’d whine and wag his tail, and give no one any peace until he got his paper collar on, and then he’d jump ashore and off like the wind.

‘Where did he go to? I’ll tell you where he went to. He went to all the men’s houses to tell the women their husbands were back. Dogs can’t tell things? That’s all you know. Jack used to tear up to the mate’s house and scratch till the door was opened. Then the mate’s missis would say: “Hallo, Jack! So the Thomas Lee’s in, eh?”

‘And then he’d off to the engineer’s house, or one of the stoker’s, and so on till he’d told everyone that the Thomas Lee was in.

‘Jack and his collar were the sign that the Thomas Lee was in, so when the men got home everything would be comfortable and ready for them.

‘“I knew you were in,” the wives used to say. “Jack was here three hours ago.”

‘But why did he do it? I can’t tell you. Did they give him nice things to eat to pay him for bringing the news? Well, they weren’t skinflints. I daresay he got a snack or two, but I’ll never believe he did it for that. He just did it out of pure cleverness.

‘Whose dog was he? Well, that was never properly settled. I don’t think myself he was anybody’s dog. He was just the ship’s dog. It was the cook brought him aboard, at least he came aboard the same time as the cook – but that may have been on account of the smell of dinner hanging about the cook. The Captain thought Jack was his dog, because he bought him a collar, though he never wore it. And the mate thought the dog was his, because Jack always went first to his house when he began his paper-collar visits. But then the mate’s house was nearest.

‘What did Jack think? Whose dog did Jack think he was? I’ll tell you all I know and then you can see what you think about it.

‘Sometimes he’d climb on to the bridge and be with the Captain. Sometimes he’d keep the engineers and stokers company below. Sometimes he’d be with the look-out man, or in the galley. Was he ever with me? Well, yes – on the bridge. I was the Captain, you see. The question of who he belonged to was never settled in his lifetime, but when he was dead. . . Well I’ve got all that is left of the old dog.

‘The end of the Thomas Lee came one wild November night, wet and bitter cold, with a strong north-easter and squalls of snow cutting across your eyes. The weather was too bad to make Sunderland. We were going to the Tyne, the nearest port of refuge. We had picked up our pilot at Flamborough; we could hardly get him out of his coble, the seas were so heavy.

‘This was the night that all seafaring men remember, when one ship after another missed the piers and found themselves on the sand to the south of the Tyne. The wind and the snow was like a whiplash across your eyes. I don’t blame the pilot; I don’t blame anybody. But the Thomas Lee went on the sands and we lost her.

‘Being in ballast we were very light and drove well up towards the shore. The great seas plunged across us, and at every crash of the water we expected the ship to break her back. And break her back she did. She went in two. All of us were on the after-part of the ship. And still the water dashed over us, and the wind screamed and tore at us, and the snow and rain blinded us and the sea thundered all round.

‘No lifeboat could get to us. Our only hope was the rockets. Fireworks? Nonsense. They fire a big rocket from the shore, with a thin rope tied to it, and if the rope falls across the wrecked ship those on board haul it in, and there’s another heavier rope tied to it, and they make this fast, and then a sort of round chair comes, slung on the rope, and one by one the wrecked men get into this and are hauled ashore through the sea and the spray.

‘The people on shore saw the flare we lit as a signal of distress, and they fired the rocket. And then we knew if what was left of the ship could hold together long enough, we were saved. So one by one the crew went ashore in the swinging rickety-looking chair – the “breeches” they called it. Jim Mason, who’d been ashore in the breeches before, off Dungeness, he went first, to show the men how it was done, for some of them were scared of it. Then the cabin-boy went. Then the crew.

‘Several of them wanted old Jack to go with them, but he made himself as stiff as a board and clung alongside my leg as if he was glued to it. And when the mate tried to haul him away he actually snapped at him. He wouldn’t go; he wasn’t going; he didn’t go. He didn’t go till the last man left the ship.

‘Who was the last man? Why me, of course, being Captain. I went ashore with old Jack, heavy and lumpy on my lap, and my arm round him, and his old rough head jammed against my neck under my ear. As we went the breeches going low with our weight, we dipped into the sea and out again, and I thought we’d never get ashore. And it was hours since we struck the sandbank, and the dawn was breaking, grey, like ashes.

‘And so all the crew of the Thomas Lee got ashore, and not a single hand lost or hurt except Jack. For when they pulled us ashore I felt him heavier in my arms than he’d been at the start, and I knew in my heart what the end was going to be.

‘I carried him into the coastguards’ room, and dried him as well as I could, and laid him by the fire on a blanket, and some of the chaps got him warm milk, but he wouldn’t take it. And we tried brandy, but it was no good. He just turned his eyes round, looking first at one and then at another, as though he was counting us up, to make sure we were all there.

‘Everyone was safe and sound, except him. Except him. I got his head on my knee and my hand on his side. He was dry now, but he wasn’t warm, for all the fire. And after a bit he turned his head and licked my hand. And that was the end of Jack.

‘You think he liked me best? You think he stayed with me because he thought I was his master? Well, the crew thought so too, and they had him stuffed and gave me that. It’s only his picture, but I’m glad I’ve got it. But as to his thinking I was his master – I don’t think he thought about masters. I think he just thought about doing his duty to the ship. And he did it.

‘A sad story? Well, we’ve all got to die someday, you know, and how can you die better than doing your duty, same as old Jack did?’

•      •      •      •

The first time Captain Cargill told us this story Martin got straight up and went out of the cottage without even saying, ‘Thank you,’ and he went off so fast that he was half-way home before I caught him up. Of course, Clifford is too old to cry about a dog, but he owns to feeling very glad that the two girls were not there. Having to explain to Captain Cargill that his young brother had suddenly remembered an engagement he had that afternoon was quite bad enough. Besides, I know the girls would have blubbed right out, and then what could I have done?

CHAPTER FOUR.

Running Away

I must tell you at once that Clifford is not the hero of this story. He is but the humble author, because he is better fitted for the task than any of the others. If anyone is the hero, it is Olive – heroine, I mean – but she has not a logical mind like Clifford and cannot narrate a story straight from beginning to end as he can.

Clifford does not say this to brag. He knows that people must be different. And it is not Olive’s fault that she has a muddly mind. An author with a muddly mind is an awful thing. I know some like this, and you can never tell what they are driving at until you have finished the story, and not always then.

This story is about what happened to the others while Martin and I were away at Lymchurch. It never would have happened if Clifford had been at home, because he wouldn’t have stood it. He is the eldest, and knows his duty to his little brothers and sisters.

He would have explained to Miss Knox, gently but firmly, just what Mother and Father would think of her if they knew she was going to leave her suffering charges to the mercy of complete strangers: which is, indeed, what she did. But you will see. . . .

Miss Knox had an invitation to be a companion to a lady who was going to Switzerland for a month. I do not understand, myself, how anyone could want Miss Knox to be a companion to go anywhere, but this lady did; and I suppose it was the chance of a lifetime to Miss Knox, and she could not resist it. She knew that Martin and I were fixed up all right for a month at Lymchurch, but at first she did not know what to do with the others. Then she saw an advertisement in some rotten paper she used to take. The advertisement said that two ladies were willing to undertake the temporary care and education of small children whose parents were abroad. She wrote to the advertisement-ladies, and when they answered she read the letter to Olive, and said it sounded ideal and the very thing, and she was sure Mother would approve. But she never went to see the ladies. She just packed up their clothes and shoved the children into the train in the care of the guard, and then rushed off to buy boots, and mufflers, and thick stockings, and alpenstocks, which are things quite necessary to Swiss travellers, I believe.

Clifford will not say what he thinks of Miss Knox for this. He is only the author, and he knows that an author must not let family feeling enter. He will try to tell the story as if he was someone else. A partial observer is what it is called, I think.

Olive and Alan and Carlie enjoyed travelling just by their three selves. It was jolly, as well as being rather grand. A lady with a tight mouth like a letter-box slit met them at the station. She said: ‘I am Miss Minto. I hope you will be good children,’ quite out loud and right before the passengers and the porter, and the guard who had been so nice and talked to them at every station. Then she gave them her horrid hand to shake, and it was like a cold fish in a black kid skin [glove].

She did not say a word in the cab, and when they got to Litchfield House she paid the cabman less than he expected, and he said some things that, later on, Alan wanted to say.

There was not enough furniture in Litchfield House, and what there was looked naked. There was linoleum instead of carpets, and in the bedrooms the boards were bare. There were no flowers put about the house as there were at home, and all the pictures in the schoolroom were maps. The schoolroom was long and narrow, and more naked than the rest of the house. It had no curtains and no comfy chairs. Only plain little desks and forms. [23]

‘It’s the most beastly place that ever was,’ said Alan.

‘You mustn’t say beastly,’ said Olive gently. ‘It’s a horrid word.’

‘You’ve said it yourself now,’ said Alan, triumphantly, ‘and anyway it is.’

There were no other children, because term had not begun yet. Miss Minto explained this, and said again that she hoped they would be good. She introduced them to Miss Margy Minto, whose hands were like hot goldfishes, red and wet. She was very fat.

There was only milk-and-water and bread-and-scrape for the children’s tea.

The grown-ups had buttered toast and potted meat.

‘No talking allowed at meals,’ said Miss Minto, and then she and Miss Margy talked all the time, through the buttered toast, about people the children didn’t know.

The children were very hungry, but no one dared to ask for any of the potted meat.

The evening seemed as if it would last forever. It was only when Carlie fell out of her chair with tiredness that Miss Minto took them to their rooms, three rooms.

‘You will sleep in my room,’ she said to Olive, ‘and Carlotta in Miss Margy’s. Alan will sleep alone.’

‘But Carlie can’t undress herself yet,’ said Olive. ‘I always—’

‘She will have to learn to undress herself,’ said Miss Minto. ‘She is five, is she not? I must request you not to interfere. And Carlie is a ridiculous name. While she is under may care she will be called Lottie.’

Olive felt furious, but she was too frightened to say anything. Only she noted where Miss Margy’s room was, and when she thought all was safe she crept along the bare passage to see how far Carlie had got in learning to undress herself. Carlie had given it up quite soon. She had pulled off one sandal without undoing the buckle – you know how difficult they are – and was fast asleep on the bare boards. Olive undressed her baby sister and put her to bed. When she turned to go back to her own room her heart gave one jump and seemed to stand still – for there, close behind her, stood Miss Minto.

‘Disobedience already?’ she said. ‘Go to your room. Tomorrow before breakfast you will write out the whole of the multiplication tables.’

So it happened that Olive got no breakfast till past twelve, and then it was only dry bread. The others had had porridge, Alan whispered, with lumps in it. In leaning over to whisper this Alan blotted his copybook.

‘You will write this out again twice before tea-time [48] ,’ said Miss Minto.

‘I won’t,’ said Alan, and flung the book across the schoolroom.

He got no dinner till he had picked it up, and begged Miss Minto’s pardon and written it all out again twice.

‘I’ll break your spirit, my boy,’ said Miss Minto.

Carlie was the only one who got all her meals that day – but when she went to bed she cried for Olive to undress her. Instead of which Miss Minto slapped her, and put her to bed herself.

Perhaps these ladies were not really monsters of cruelty, but had just been brought up very strictly themselves, and thought that all children ought to be treated in the same way. They had no children of their own or perhaps they would have known better.

The children’s breath was quite taken away by so much unhappiness, coming so suddenly, and right on top of their other misfortunes. Alan and Olive wrote and told Mother in France how miserable they were and how horrid Miss Minto and Miss Margy were, and Miss Minto opened the letters and read them out loud at breakfast. Then she tore them up and put the pieces in the slop-basin.

‘You’ve no right to read our letters,’ said Alan boldly.

‘No, you haven’t,’ said Olive, quaking, but determined to back up her brother.

‘No, you hasn’t,’ said Carlie; ‘horrid thing, you are. . . .’

The remainder of the day was spent by the three in disgrace and in separate rooms. Next day they were made to write neat letters to Mother on ruled paper, saying they hoped she was getting better, and that they were already making progress in their studies.

So the miserable days went on – the children were never left alone together for more than a few moments. They had no chance of comforting each other. Alan no longer spoke his mind. Carlie was getting thin. Olive, being the eldest, lay awake for a long time – quite half an hour – every night, wondering and wondering what she ought to do.

Then came an evening when the children were sent to bed in broad daylight, at six o’clock. This often happened, but usually as a punishment for some of the many wrong things that you so easily do in a house where nobody loves you. This time they had been good in a crushed bewildered way – but they were sent to bed early because Miss Minto and Miss Margy were going to a Bazaar.

The minute the big front-door had banged behind Miss Minto, Olive leaped up in her bed and listened. There was no sound in the house but the ticking of the clock on the stairs. She ran on soft, silent, bare feet to Alan’s room. He was at the window in his nightgown, trying to catch flies.

‘Alan,’ she said, and he jumped.

‘They’ll catch you,’ he said gloomily, ‘and it’ll be dry bread again.’

‘Look here,’ said Olive desperately. ‘We can’t go on like this.’

‘We’ve got to,’ said Alan.

‘No, we haven’t,’ said Olive. ‘We’ll run away – now – tonight.’

‘They’d only catch us,’ said Alan, for his spirit was by this time broken, as Miss Minto said it would be.

‘No, they won’t. We’ve got the pound Daddy sent us. It’s a good thing my desk has got a secret drawer. They’d have taken it like they did our half-crowns, [17] “to take care of” for us. We’ll go to the station and take a ticket for the nearest place to Uncle Edward’s. We’ll put our pillows in our beds to look like us – and they’ll not find out till they tell us to get up in the morning, and we don’t.’

Alan giggled at the pleasant thought.

‘They will be in a wax,’ [56] he said delightedly.

‘You see,’ said Olive earnestly, ‘it isn’t only us. Perhaps we could go on bearing it. But it’s Carlie. She’s getting thin. She cries half the time. Oh, Alan, I can’t sleep at night. Suppose she was to die.’

‘I wish you wouldn’t,’ said Alan fretfully. ‘And what places are there between here and London? I don’t believe you know.’

Olive didn’t.

‘But we can find out at the station,’ she said. ‘I know we passed Uncle Edward’s place coming down. I shall know the place’s name directly I hear it.’

‘Wouldn’t it be better,’ said Alan, ‘if we just wrote a letter to Mother to tell her we aren’t quite well, and aren’t making any progress in our lessons and don’t want to neither? Then she’d write to Uncle Edward and get him to come and fetch us away.’

‘It wouldn’t be any good,’ Olive assured him. ‘I expect the hateful Mintos are friends of the Post Office people. They’d get the letters and open them, and then it would begin all over again. Dress, Alan, and I will, too, and then we’ll get Carlie up.’

‘But the servants?’

‘They’ve all gone to tea with Jane’s young man. Jane told me this morning, only it’s a great secret – they slipped out the back way directly the old Cats had gone out in front. Jane said they would.’

And Alan’s broken spirit could find no further objections to offer. They were soon dressed except for their boots, which had been taken down to be cleaned.

‘We must go and look for them,’ said Olive. ‘They’ll be in the kitchen.’

The kitchen was, of course, forbidden ground, but they had been there more than once – a place delightful because Jane was so much nicer than Miss Minto. Besides, there was a canary in a cage, and a geranium in the window, and Jane’s workbox with the picture of Tunbridge Wells on the top.

They found their boots in the wash-house and put them on. It was still quite light out of doors, but the wash-house was shadowy. The last boot but one – Carlie’s right – was being laced when a sudden sound shattered the sleepy silence. Olive, as she said later, was turned to stone with the very bootlace in her hand.

‘Go on – lacey up,’ said Carlie aloud.

‘Sh!’ said Olive and Alan together. They held their breaths. A footstep came along the flagged path, and somebody fumbled at the lock of the back door.

‘Quick – behind the copper [15] ,’ whispered Olive, dragging Carlie towards that ambush. There was room for all three, and a convenient clothes-horse, hung with drying dusters, made a perfect screen.

The lock creaked and the wash-house door opened. A man came in. The Mintos kept no manservant. This man had no right here. He passed through the kitchen – and the children heard the sound of a drawer pulled out and the rattle of knives and forks.

‘It’s a burglar,’ Alan whispered.

‘He’ll help us,’ said Olive confidently. Of course she had read many stories in which the burglar saves the house from fire or fetches the doctor for the sick baby.

‘He won’t. He’ll tell,’ said Alan.

‘Silly – he can’t tell about us without telling about his burgling, too. He’s sure to know the names of the stations. You must know heaps of geography if you’re a burglar – because of hiding your booty in different spots.’

‘Shut up!’ said Alan. ‘Wait till he’s cleared out and we’ll bunk.’ [09]

It was then that Carlie sneezed. The next minute the clothes-horse was pushed aside and they were face to face with the burglar – a large young man with a round, jolly face, quite nice clothes, and a geranium in his buttonhole.

‘Hullo,’ he said, and then he laughed. ‘Why, if I didn’t think for a minute it was the tabbies. You did give me a turn.’

‘Don’t be afraid,’ said Olive earnestly; ‘we won’t betray you.’

‘Very handsome of you, Miss, I’m sure,’ said the burglar.

‘And you won’t betray us,’ she went on more earnestly. ‘But you won’t take anything, will you?’

‘Nothing, thank you, Miss. But I thought you was in bed.’

‘I’m sorry if we disappointed you,’ said Alan; ‘but if you’ll help us to escape we’ll give you some of our money, and then you can get a new start and begin to lead a new life, and give up your present dreadful one, can’t you?’

‘What’s that?’ said the young man with the geranium in his buttonhole. ‘Say that again.’

‘You look quite nice,’ said Olive. ‘Don’t be a burglar any more: our uncle will help you to find some honest work – he often helps people when they come out of prison.’

‘A burglar? Prison? Me?’ said the young man. ‘Well – if ever I thought to see the day.’ And then he sat down on the copper-edge on purpose to laugh. At least that’s what it looked like.

‘Oh, don’t pretend you aren’t one,’ said Olive. ‘You can’t deceive us – we know. We heard you rattling the silver, but we’ll never tell – and you will be good now, won’t you? And learn an honest trade?’

‘Oh, Miss,’ gasped the burglar, wiping his eyes with the back of his hand, ‘don’t say a word more or I shall go off again! An honest trade – well, well.’

‘Do you know of any stations between here and London?’ Alan asked suddenly.

And the man surprisingly said, ‘Every blessed one.’

‘Could you say them?’

And still more surprisingly he began, ‘Stamford, Helpstone, Walton, Peterborough, Holme, Huntingdon, Offord, St. Neots, Charrington, Tempsford—’

‘Stop, stop,’ cried Olive, dancing with excitement on the stone floor. ‘—Charrington. . . that’s the place’s name. Our uncle lives at Charrington – him we’re running away to. Will you tell us about the trains and help us to go?’

‘That’ll want some thinking about,’ said the burglar. ‘What do you want to run away for? Here, let’s have a sit down in the kitchen and you tell me all about it.’ And then out it all came, the miserable story of those two weeks – the bread and water and the punishments – the thinness of Carlie and her inability to deal with strings and buttons – and the letters that were opened and not sent.

‘And, oh,’ said Olive, ‘if Mother only knew! I know she’d want us to run away to Uncle Edward. You will help us – won’t you?’

By this time the burglar had Olive in one arm and Alan in the other and Carlie half asleep on his knee. He pressed the three in one great hug.

‘You poor little mites,’ he said. ‘No – I won’t help you to run away. I’ll telegraph to your uncle and he can come and fetch you. If I do it now he might get here tonight.’

He tried to get up, but they clung to him with arms and legs.

‘Don’t leave us,’ they said. ‘Oh, don’t leave us. We can’t bear it – oh, we can’t!’ Olive began to cry – Alan was very near it, and Carlie woke up just in time to add her wails to theirs.

‘There, stow it,’ said the young man resignedly. ‘What must be must – and Jane’s leaving at the end of the month anyhow.’

‘Jane?’

‘Yes, Jane. I ain’t no burglar, Miss,’ he said. ‘I’m Jane’s young man – and it’s my birthday, and we got a party on. And Jane she knit me a tie and forgot to bring it, and she gave me the key of the back door to slip in and get the tie – and here it is. And if so be as you won’t go back to bed like good children. . .’

‘No.’

‘No.’

‘No.’

‘Then come along home with me – and we’ll chance it with the tabbies if Uncle doesn’t turn up before closing time.’

But he did.

The children have only a confused memory of a walk along pleasant streets where the lights of windows shone through the purple dusk, of a small room with hot-smelling lamps, of lots of people, all very kind and astonished, of being kissed by a good many strangers, and of Jane saying she didn’t care what happened, she’d often wondered how she could stand by and see it, that she had. Also they remembered having a great many curious things to eat and drink, and that people sang songs – Jane was just beginning the fourth or fifth verse of the ‘Bird in a Gilded Cage’ – when there was a toot-toot outside and a snorting and a snuffling, and when Jane’s young man opened the door someone came blinking in, in a funny motor-coat. And it was Uncle Edward.

‘If you’d let me have a word outside, Sir,’ the children remember Jane’s young man saying, and that he and Jane went out and talked to Uncle Edward just outside the window for ever so long.

And then he drove them home through the moonlight to his own home – not to Miss Minto’s; and he was not at all cross.

And then after a while they all went to sleep wrapped up in rugs at the back of the car until they were lifted out by Uncle Edward’s housekeeper, and given warm drinks and put to bed: Olive and Carlie in a big bed together, where they could cuddle each other all night, and with nothing to frighten them.

They wrote to Jane’s young man to thank him. But they did not write to Miss Minto. Uncle did that.

Jane’s young man turned out to be a railway porter. That is how he came to know all the names of the stations. When he and Jane got married Uncle Edward gave them an overmantel [42]  for a wedding present, and Olive made them a kettle-holder in red and grey wool, to hang just under the overmantel. This overmantel was Jane’s choice.

‘It wouldn’t have been mine,’ said Uncle Edward.

CHAPTER FIVE.

The Sleuth Worm

Most people live very uneventful lives. This is not so with our family – especially Clifford. But you will see. . .

When we had been separated from our sorrowing parents for nearly four months Mother came home from the South of France quite well and jolly, with Aunt Emma. And Miss Knox went away.

Clifford cannot say he was sorry, though, when Miss Knox kissed everybody and said brightly, ‘Well, we shall all meet again soon, I trust,’ of course he joined with the others in saying, ‘Oh, yes, I hope so.’ Really in his innermost heart he hoped that her words would not come true. But he knows that you must be polite to ladies whatever the inside feelings may be.

Our other sorrowing parent was still in Dominica trying to restore the fallen fortunes of our house, and until he had done it we had to go on living in Aunt Emma’s house near Blackheath. We went to a day-school there, and so did the girls. Having Mother again, made it jolly though, in spite of our impoverishment.

Blackheath is a place where they are always having Bazaars or Rummage Sales, or Tennis Teas, or Garden Parties; and sometimes we went with Mother to them. Clifford does not care much about such things himself, but sometimes they lead to other adventures. And this is exactly what happened.

Mother came into our playroom one afternoon when we were cleaning out our aquarium, and said:

‘Clifford, you remember that lady you helped at the Bazaar last Saturday – the very rich lady with all the expensive things on her stall that nobody could afford to buy?’

Clifford did. The lady had wanted to move her stall to another place because of the sun, and our hero had found a convenient wheelbarrow lurking in a conservatory, and had carted all her gewgaws [25]  for her.

‘Well,’ said Mother, ‘it appears that she also remembers you. She has written to ask if my “charming son” will go and spend a month with her children these holidays. She says they are older than you, but that you seemed so manly for your age that she is sure you will get on splendidly together. I’ve written to say that of course you are delighted.’

Fathers and Mothers are often very clever and know a great many things, but they do not know everything.

Clifford was so upset at this news that he dropped a newt he was just transferring from a jar to the clean tank, and by the time the newt was retrieved and returned to its native element, Mother had gone, and Clifford could not explain his true feelings to her. He registered a vow there and then that it would be a long time before he was helpful at any old Bazaar again.

It was bad enough to have the others calling him ‘charming’ and ‘manly’ every time they spoke to him, but to have it said that he was delighted, when what he really felt was utter loth and despair, was rather too much.

•      •      •      •

Clifford did not at all want to go and stay with these people in the country. To begin with, they were strangers to him; secondly, it was just holiday time, and Clifford and his brothers had plans of their own, which included an organized digging for treasure in the back garden of Aunt Emma’s yellow brick villa; being explorers, and the thorough damming of the Kidbrook, a stream which runs beyond the brickfield, and whose banks are clay where they are not sardine tins and old kettles and saucepans with holes in them, and odd boots, not pairs of boots, because for some mysterious reason no one ever seems to throw away two boots at the same time. There was, besides, an intention of buying dark-lanterns [54]  and being detectives with them in case the bank, which was just round the corner, should be robbed again as we heard it had been last holidays.

‘You must always change for the evening,’ said Mother; and when Alan said, ‘Change what?’ Mother said, ‘Everything.’

Then there were no end of tiresome instructions about sitting upright at meals, and things to remember about knives and forks and finger-bowls – if there should be finger-bowls – and about cleaning your nails, and about a collar never being clean enough to wear unless you don’t ask yourself whether it’s clean enough or not. There were new clothes, however, a good many of them, and even boys like those.

Then Olive said:

‘You are lucky, Clifford. Don’t I just wish it was me!’ And that cheered him up a little. But Martin said, ‘I’m jolly glad it’s not me, then,’ which depressed our hero so much that he went and asked his mother whether he need go.

‘Of course, dear,’ she said brightly. ‘You’ll enjoy it tremendously when you get there. Just think of it, quite in the country, ponies to ride, perhaps, and a stream to fish in, and dessert every day most likely. Think of the peaches.’

And Aunt Emma said, ‘Never refuse a new experience, Clifford, they are always interesting. And this will be a new experience. You’ve always been the eldest, so far.’ And there was something not very nice about the way she said it.

Clifford did think, for a minute, and then he thought of the Kidbrook being dammed without him, the treasure, without him again, being discovered in the garden, and the bank manager’s gratitude when the bank was saved by bold amateur detectives, of whom he would not be one.

The only person who really reconciled him at all to his fate was his Uncle John, who happened to hear he was going and who gave him a new silver watch as well as a morocco pocket-book and a yellow and totally unexpected coin; with no good advice except the suggestion that he should try not to be a young muff. [41]

And so, with a new leather trunk and a hat-box for the topper [50]  which he was to wear at church, and which felt whenever he tried it on so very insecure; with a shilling’s-worth of stamps for writing home with, and a new umbrella – he had never used an umbrella and never meant to – he was seen off by his mother, and, in charge of a red-faced guard, set out for the unknown.

All the talk about top-hats and finger-bowls had upset him a good deal. Why couldn’t everybody live as we lived, comfortable, fairly shabby, never having any clothes that mattered much? That was the right way to live, surely, and if it was, why was Clifford to go to these people pretending he was used to living quite differently with toppers and finger-bowls, and changing your clothes for the evening?

‘It’ll be simply beastly,’ he said to himself in the train, ‘but anyhow I shan’t be disappointed. I know what to expect.’

As it happened he didn’t. Nobody could have. The strange children met him at the station with a little pony-cart, which Rupert, the eldest, drove himself. As a matter of politeness he asked if Clifford would like to drive, but Clifford saw that the offer was not made to be accepted, so he said, ‘No, thank you.’

Arthur, the other boy, slapped him on the back and said:

‘You shall tomorrow, but Rupert makes him go best. He’s called Dandy. He’s our very own.’

‘We’ve got four horses for riding,’ said Rupert. ‘You can ride, I suppose?’

It was hard to have to say no, but safer, and our hero got it said.

‘Oh, can’t you?’ said Arthur.

‘Oh, that’s all right,’ said Rupert. ‘Shut up, Arthur. Old Clay’ll soon show him. It’s quite easy. Do you like fishing?’

‘Yes,’ said Clifford, quite truly. Like so many, he had often fished, but again, like so many, he had never caught anything.

The girls made room for him in the cart and talked to him quite kindly. But he was very shy, and couldn’t think of anything to say. Rupert signalled to Arthur that he thought Clifford was a muff, and I am sorry to say our hero saw and understood the signal. It made him even more uncomfortable than before.

‘I shall have to do something rather splendid just to show them,’ he thought in his secret self, and for the rest of the drive his thoughts were busy with the idea of saving these people (1) from drowning, (2) from mad bulls, (3) from a burning house, (4) from bandits, (5) from the Germans in the event of an invasion – so that he was more silent than before, and their opinion of him was confirmed.

Mabel and Constance, the two girls, seemed to try to be kind to him and to find it uphill work.

They wore blue linen smocks and sun-bonnets, and nobody could suppose that they took any care of their clothes. The Norfolks of Rupert and his brother were quite as dusty as even Clifford could wish.

While they were driving through the green lanes, and afterwards while he was being shown the rabbits, the guinea-pigs, the tortoise and the hedge-pig, about none of which he could find much to say, he felt half sorry that he had brought the brand new Eton suit [22]  and the stack of white collars. But when, later on, he met the others on the stairs and saw how very black and white were the boys and how lacey and blue-ribbony the girls, he was not sorry.

The drawing-room seemed full of people, all in evening dress and very smart. A large black-haired man with a pointed nose said:

‘Well, young man?’ and Clifford supposed it must be his host, and when a languid lady in sea-green satin said how glad she was his dear mother had let him come Clifford had no difficulty in concluding she was his hostess, and the lady he had been so unfortunately polite to at the Bazaar, though she looked quite different without a hat.

The other children were busy talking to the grown-ups, and our hero managed to creep to cover behind the corner of a large settee, and a plant in a pot concealed him almost entirely from public view.

‘I wish I hadn’t come,’ he told himself disheartedly, and he thought of the damming of the Kidbrook, and looked at his cuffs; how nice and muddy his brothers and sisters were, while he. . . It would hardly bear thinking about.

It was a dreadful evening, in spite of the kaleidoscope and the stereoscope, and the other things that he was from time to time dragged from his retirement to look at. He had that dismal feeling that he was really quite a decent chap, and that it would be very hard to make these people see what a decent chap he was. And his mind dwelt more and more on the thought of doing something extra noble so as to convince them that he was not the muff they plainly took him for.

‘Suppose there was to be a burglary,’ he thought, looking at all the jewels that sparkled and gleamed on the necks and heads of the ladies, ‘and I was to catch the burglars on the stairs and compel them to surrender their prey single-handed?’

He thought of this until it was time to go to bed in a room much bigger than the drawing-room at home.

Next morning a manservant solemnly told Clifford the time, and he got up convinced that he had before him a melancholy and misunderstood day, of which the falling off a horse would be not the least pleasant part.

They had breakfast in the schoolroom, a pleasant room with French windows opening on to a lawn enclosed by a tall hedge of roses. All colours they were. Clifford wished the others at home could have seen them. And the children were really not bad, only he could not rid himself of the feeling that he was in an enemy’s country where the one necessary thing was to be on one’s guard.

Then, suddenly, quite without warning, a grown-up put his head in at the door and said in a tone of surprise:

‘Oh, he isn’t here! I thought he wouldn’t be,’ and took his head out again.

‘Hullo!’ said Rupert, ‘something must be up. Mr. Erskine’s in no end of a bait.’

We all trooped out into the hall to ask questions of the first person we met, an aunt, and were told not to bother for goodness’ sake.

‘Let’s go round to the kitchen,’ Constance suggested, and we went round by the garden and through a laurel hedge that had a convenient thin patch in it.

In five minutes we knew all. Our hero’s dream had come true – at least a part of it. There had been a burglary, and a lot of the plate was gone, and everybody’s jewels except the ones belonging to those careful ladies who slept with their diamonds under their pillows. The other half of the dream had not come true. Clifford had not had the good fortune to meet the burglars on the stairs. Still, even half a dream come true is something.

The whole house buzzed like a hive. Ladies and their maids wept with equal violence. Gentlemen and footmen rubbed their chins and told each other again and again exactly how it must have happened. The house and the grounds were heavy with the boots of the police.

‘Oh, bother it all,’ said Rupert; ‘now we shan’t hear of anything else all the hols [32] . Let’s go fishing.’

Clifford would much have preferred to stay in the house to watch and to listen, and to do, or to refrain from doing, all the things that detectives did and didn’t do. But he was only a guest, and had not the courage to say so.

Cook found getting rid of us and our questions cheap at the price of packing a luncheon basket; the grown-ups welcomed the idea of a fishing expedition with absent-minded but unmistakable enthusiasm, so presently we all set out, with baskets and rods and books of flies and a spade. The books for swank, and the spade to dig worms with.

‘I suppose there wasn’t any clue?’ said our hero, for his powerful mind was bent on discovering the miscreants, and he could not think about anything but the burglary.

‘Now look here,’ said Rupert, ‘I bar any more jaw about that burglary. I vote the one that mentions it again does all the digging.’

Our hero fell into meditation, and was silent for about five minutes.

‘A penny for your thoughts?’ said someone suddenly.

‘I was wondering,’ he said, ‘whether they’d found any rope-ladders, or jemmies, or dark-lanterns, and whether—’

‘You’ve got it right in the neck this time, old chap,’ said Arthur. ‘Come on, old wormdigger. We’ll find you a nice soft place. And the can won’t take you more than an hour to fill, unless the birds are shy – the worms, I mean.’

‘We’ll go on. The river isn’t much further,’ said Rupert. ‘We’ll throw a fly or two till you come.’

‘You’ll soon catch us up,’ said Mabel. ‘Here’s the spade.’

They gave me the spade and the empty yawning can, and they found a soft-looking place under a lime-tree, with a mole-hill quite near, to sit on if I was tired, and they left me there to dig. Our hero heard them laughing as they went away, and he knew that they were glad to have got rid of him.

The spade was heavy and the day was hot, and the worms were, as Arthur suggested, shy. Clifford looked at his new silver watch and found that it was fourteen minutes and three-quarters since the others had left him, and he had only found one worm – a large one, it is true – and a small piece of pink string.

He dug again and, pausing to mop his forehead with one of his new handkerchiefs, perceived that in his struggles with the spade he had kicked over the bait-can, so that it now lay on its side, a position the worm had taken advantage of. Its long red length was almost free of the tin, and a stout blackbird, with its head on one side, was looking at the worm with a more than friendly interest.

‘Hi, stop that!’ said our hero to the blackbird, and to the worm he said, ‘I shall have to tie you up, old chap.’

Clifford is not really a cruel boy, and I cannot tell you why it seemed to him that it would be amusing to tie the pink string round the middle of the worm and to hang it on a twig. But it did: and he did. And there the worm hung, limp and lonely, and the blackbird sat on another twig and looked at it. Clifford sat down on the mole-hill and looked at both of them. He wondered why there was a piece of pink string in the middle of the wood. It was like the sort of string they tie round jeweller’s boxes. He was dead tired. He wished he didn’t have to dig for worms, but could have stayed at the house and heard more about the burglary. That was much more interesting than fishing. Suddenly the blackbird hopped a twig nearer. The worm did nothing. Clifford wished he had tied the string more carefully.

‘If the bird touches it,’ he said, ‘it will just slip off – it’s only a slipknot.’

Dear reader, this part will be difficult to believe. But it is true, so you must try. And you will see that in the end I can prove it. Suddenly the blackbird flew towards the worm. Clifford did not see what happened. His attention was suddenly distracted by a frightful pain in his feet. He had hardly time to say ‘Ow!’ when he felt that he was no longer on the ground, but was swinging at the end of a long rope above a limitless gulf.

‘There’s been an earthquake,’ he told himself; ‘the earth has opened under my feet. Oh, my feet!’ he screamed, as again the pain took him, and a vast black cloud rushed swiftly by him with a noise of mighty wings. Curiously enough, this calmed him.

‘It can’t be true,’ he said, ‘I must be in bed and dreaming.’

He tried to pinch himself to see if he was really asleep, but somehow he couldn’t find his hands. Then the black cloud came again and the rushing of wings. And then the awful sensation of falling, falling, falling, and at last the ground, among sharp canes or saplings, and the terrible sense of danger and pursuit.

‘There’s something after me. I must hide,’ he told himself, ‘and I’m different somehow. Oh, what is it? What am I?’ And the next moment he found himself eating earth for dear life, and knew that the canes and saplings among which he had fallen were just the grass spears, that the enemy he feared was the blackbird, and that he himself was eating earth faster and more eagerly than he had ever eaten the nicest cake, and, worst of all, that he was not Clifford any more, but The Worm.

‘And I suppose he’s me,’ Clifford said, as he pulled the last of himself under the ground with a wrench. ‘That was my boots sticking, I suppose. No, of course he’s got my boots. Well, the blackbird hasn’t got me anyhow. I suppose I’ve got into a fairy-tale, or something like that. I wonder how long I am. I feel very long indeed, longer than that worm was by a lot. I feel as though I’d got an extra tail as well as my all-the-way-down-the-sameishness. I wish I knew which way to go. I suppose it’s all the same underground. I wonder what I’m supposed to do? If it’s to deliver a captive princess I simply can’t, like this. I wonder why it’s happened to me. Oh! for stringing the worm up, I suppose, like Benjy in Beastland. Well, I’m sorry I did, if that’s all. I wouldn’t have if I’d known how beastly it felt.’

He stopped at that, hoping perhaps that the Power which had changed him to a worm would let him off, now that he had said he was sorry. But nothing happened.

‘I may as well go on,’ he said drearily. And ate more dirt. He was just feeling that he couldn’t eat another mouthful, whatever happened, when he found there was no more earth to eat. He had come to the end of it, and the front part of him, which he had been eating with, hung out over a gulf. People will tell you that worms have neither eyes nor ears, and they may be right, but this was not an ordinary worm; it could not have been, of course, or Clifford would not have been it. Other people will tell you that there is no light underground, so that a worm’s eyes would not be any use to him if he had them. These people cannot be right. Because there was light underground, lots of it, a sort of greeny light, like glowworms. A fleeting wonder crossed Clifford’s mind as to whether he might have changed into a glow-worm, but he wriggled all along his endless rings and felt that he was no short, thick glow-worm, but a long, a very long, earthworm sticking out of the side of a large gallery. In that gallery sat an enormous person in a fur coat (very like his Uncle Edward, Clifford thought), and spoke suddenly and crossly:

‘Go away,’ it said; ‘no worms allowed here. Run away and play.’

‘But I’m not an ordinary worm,’ our hero pleaded.

‘Ah,’ said the furry-coated one, ‘that’s what you all say. And yet you all are. Very.’

‘Who are you, please?’ said Clifford.

‘The mole, of course,’ said the furry stranger, ‘and this is my house. Out you go, my lad.’

‘Mayn’t I come through?’ Clifford asked. ‘I think there’s something wrong with the other half of me. I feel as though I couldn’t go back.’

‘Well, make a hole alongside yourself,’ said the mole; ‘there’s quite enough of you sticking out to turn round with. Good thing for you I’m not a hungry bird. Hurry up.’ Clifford hurried, but it was difficult, and the part that stretched from one hole to the other felt very bare and unprotected. Suppose someone with a spade. . . ? he had seen such things happen in the garden and had thought nothing of them. Now he shuddered at the thought, shuddered in every one of his rings. It seemed as if he would never be able to eat enough dirt to get all of himself out of the mole’s house.

And then quite suddenly he came across the other worm. He knew it for one of his own kind directly their sleek sides touched. They were too near to see each other, even if the other worm had eyes, which I am not at all sure of.

‘Are you a real worm?’ was Clifford’s first question.

‘Of course I am,’ said the other, very much offended; ‘so are you.’

‘I’m not,’ said Clifford, ‘that’s just it. I was a human boy once, and I got changed into a worm because I hung one of you up by a string.’

‘Fishing?’ asked the other in a pained whisper.

‘Not exactly,’ said Clifford. ‘I didn’t really mean to hurt. I did it for fun. Isn’t there anyone down here I can say I am sorry to, and get let off?’

‘No use saying it to me,’ said the other, yawning. ‘And of course you were a human boy creature once. We all were.’

‘And you stop so? For always?’

I can tell you Clifford felt the full horror of his situation. He was one of thousands of earthworms all of whom were once boys.

‘We stop here, of course, until we stop stopping here.’

‘And you were all boys once?’

‘So some of them say. I think it’s all swank myself. Like what you were saying. Thank the shadows I was born an earthworm, and a true-hearted earthworm I’ll live and die. I can’t see what’s the good of pretending you’ve been something else you never were and were never meant to be, and never could have been.’

‘But I was,’ said Clifford.

‘You can’t pull my leg,’ said the worm.

‘’Cause why – you haven’t got one,’ said Clifford.

‘You know what I mean. I picked that expression up from the mole. They pulled his leg once, in a trap. He says it was terrible. I could never have it done to me.’

‘Is there no way of getting out?’ said Clifford in despair.

‘If you go up you get out,’ said the worm, ‘but my own feeling is the deeper the safer. So long!’

‘So long,’ said our hero, feeling longer than ever. And so they parted.

And now the earth got looser and looser, and more and more stony. And the stones were very sharp and painful. Clifford had to twist this way and that to avoid being hurt rather badly. Fortunately the body he occupied was suited for twisting. The stones were of all sizes, some of them enormous, and there was hardly any earth to eat. He had to get along as best he could. He persevered, however, working upward as much as possible, because it had suddenly occurred to him that if he became a boy again, underground, and in such a very stony place, his position might be not only painful but dangerous.

And then quite suddenly he felt himself held fast by the suffering middle of him. The more he pulled the tighter the hold was. Could it be the mole? He thought not, the mole would have hurt more. Slowly and with much caution he wriggled himself round among the stones to see what was holding him. It was the little piece of pink string! Its end had caught on something, and there he was, a prisoner, perhaps forever.

And then in a flash he understood all that prisoners feel, whether they are Reformers in Russian dungeons or worms in a bait-tin.

‘Oh,’ said Clifford, ‘if ever I can get out I’ll never put anything in prison again. Not even flies in paper cages. Oh, if only I could get free!’

He writhed and he pulled, and he thought the string gave a little, as he twisted and wriggled among the strange-shaped stones. It had given a little, for now he could move to a more open space between a wall of silver and a heap of great gleaming crystals. There were other heaps of crystals, too, white and blue and green, and great smooth rocks of silver and gold.

Clifford thought of gnomes and enchanted mountains. Perhaps he had wormed his way into one of these. If he could only meet a gnome now, instead of these silly, useless worms and moles. Gnomes understood magic. They were usually friendly in spite of their humpy appearance. They could let him out, perhaps, if he could convince them he was sorry and really never would tie strings round worms again as long as he lived. He lay still for a moment striving to take a quick worm’s-eye view of the situation. It would not be waste of time, for if he lay quite still the gnomes might come out.

So he lay very still. But no gnomes came.

‘I must just go on pulling, then,’ he told himself. And then he remembered a dreadful story he had once heard and laughed at – how could he have laughed at it? A story of two hens, each of whom had swallowed one end of a worm.

‘Someone’s got to give way,’ said another hen who was looking on. And someone had to. And the one who gave way was the worm, and that gave way in the middle. Horrible – horrible!

He pulled more fiercely than ever, and, oh, joy! he could feel the string slipping from his waistcoat part down to his knees, or where his knees would have been if worms had knees, and then to his ankles. And then, once again, a fierce pain in his feet, if a worm could have feet.

He knew now that the other pain in his feet had happened when the bird pecked at the worm when it was hanging. There are no birds underground. What could be pecking at him now? He writhed forward, and now the string no longer held him. He saw daylight. He had eaten his way out of the earth. There was sunshine, and. . .

Someone was kicking at his boots and saying:

‘Well, of all the rotten slackers! I believe you’ve been asleep.’

‘I haven’t,’ said Clifford, looking down at his boots and hands and his waistcoat buttons, at every part of himself which he could see. Boots, hands, legs, clothes – it all seemed beautiful to him, it was all so unwormlike.

‘What have you been doing, then?’ asked Rupert, who had been the kicker.

‘I’ve been— I’ve been—’ Clifford saw that it was quite useless to try and explain. He knew now that he had been dreaming, and that he had been lying on his legs in such a way that they were full of pins and needles, but he felt at the same time that it was not an ordinary dream that he had had.

‘I’ve been thinking,’ he said, and the others all burst out laughing.

‘That’s a good thing to call it,’ said Arthur.

‘Yes, I have,’ said Clifford, and then in one glorious flash he saw that he had not been a worm for nothing. The detective success that the boy had been aching for had happened to the worm.

‘I’ve been thinking about the burglary. I’ve been worming my way into the secrets of the criminals. No, it’s no use shoving me, any of you, or giving me that spade again. I’m not going to dig worms. I’m not going fishing. I’m going to be the sleuth hound of the law and find the booty abandoned by the ruffians.’

‘All right,’ said Rupert kindly; ‘we may as well play that as anything. I’m not so jolly keen on fishing myself. Only we didn’t know you could play make-up games. We always do when we are by ourselves.’

‘This is no game,’ said our hero, now well into his part. ‘Clifford Octavious, the priceless Sleuth Worm, will now unfold his tale. But, look here,’ he suddenly whispered seriously, ‘we may be watched. They must have buried their booty here because they couldn’t get away with it last night. And of course they’ll come back for it. And they might come back for it now. Hist, be cautious! Let us sit down and talk of fish, while one of you runs to the house and brings some of the men. This is a dangerous action we are embarked on. Haste! Courage and dispatch! I once caught a salmon that weighed half a ton – with a line,’ he said carelessly and in a loud voice.

‘I say, you do do it well,’ said Mabel, admiring him.

‘Go it, Clifford, old sleuth worm,’ said Arthur.

Then Clifford said, ‘Look here,’ and showed the blank pages of his new pocket-book as though they were something to read. ‘Pretend to be reading while I whisper. I’d rather have done it in play, but you don’t seem to see that I mean it. While you were away I found out where the burglars have hidden the things they took last night. But some of the caitiffs [10]  may be hanging about, so I’d rather not touch the treasure till we’ve got the grown-ups here. Tell them to bring guns. No, I’m not kidding. Honour bright, I’m not.’

‘You do do it jolly well,’ was all he got for an answer.

‘All right, if you don’t believe me. But you just go and tell your father what I said. I’ll stand the row if he makes one. But he won’t. He’ll come, if it’s only to give it me if I was kidding.’

It took a quarter of an hour to persuade them that he wasn’t. And our hero was right! Their father did come, and for exactly that reason. But in case there should be any other reason he brought two gardeners with him.

‘What’s all this?’ the father said crossly.

Then Clifford said: ‘Look here, there are footmarks all about here. Men’s. And the earth has been disturbed, and I found a piece of pink string.’ Then for the first time the thought came to him that perhaps it was only an ordinary dream, and that those red and blue and white and green jewels and the great silver things of which he had had a worm’s-eye view were not real at all, but only dream treasure. So then he trembled and hesitated, and felt as if he were going to cry and he said:

‘I daresay it’s all nonsense, but I do wish you’d just dig once, to see.’ He pointed to the spot of earth underneath the twig where the worm had hung by the pink string.

‘Might as well, sir,’ said the gardener; ‘the earth have been disturbed here, that’s true enough.’

So they dug, and Clifford looked anxiously at the bushes, expecting every moment that the burglars would return for their prey. But they didn’t.

At first the spade only turned up soft brown mould – how well our hero remembered the taste of it – but the seventh spadeful was enriched by a diamond necklace and the ninth by a ruby pendant, and then thick and fast came gems and jewels, plate and ornaments, gold and silver, and the very last thing to be pulled out of the hole was a silver fork with a bit of pink string entangled in its prongs.

•      •      •      •

So now our hero was a hero indeed. His host and his hostess and the ladies and gentlemen who had got their things back praised and petted him more than he could bear. It was in vain that he said it was nothing, and he had not done anything.

‘Ah, that’s just his modesty, dear child,’ they said.

And of course it was useless to explain about his dream. He knew they wouldn’t have believed it. I told you it was going to be very difficult to believe. His cousins treated him with enormous respect, and somehow or other it made him just as uncomfortable as being wrongfully considered a muff, like they had thought in the beginning.

So, although he ceased to be worried about collars, and sitting up straight at meals, and things like that, and though he really did enjoy himself more than he had expected, he was quite glad to go home.

And when he got home and found that the bank had not been robbed in his absence, and that the others had nobly put off the damming of the Kidbrook until his return, his cup of happiness was full. And somehow it was not at all unpleasant to be thought a hero at home. In the eyes of his family he was indeed covered in glory, and this was very important because it quite cleared up the nonsense about those Lymchurch burglars who were not burglars at all. Clifford had never quite lived that down, but now it was forever buried in oblivion. The others had to admit that he did know something about detective work after all.

Clifford himself thinks it is very strange that Fate should have played him such a rotten trick about that Lymchurch business and then behaved like this on another occasion – sending him a dream that looked utter nonsense, and which led to such glorifying results. But he remembers to have heard that Fate is very capricious. (Capricious means being inclined to play the goat.)

CHAPTER SIX.

The Coming of Madeline

This is all about something we were more sorry for than anything we ever did, and yet the present writer thinks it did more good than harm. But all the same we are sorry, because it was not sporting of us. And I say this now, to get it off my chest.

But first of all I must tell you that a wonderful change came into our lives. I don’t mean Madeline, though she did too, but something really splendiferous and glorious.

It happened soon after Clifford came home from his detective-like visit to the country. We were all sitting at breakfast in Aunt Emma’s house. There were some letters for Mother beside her plate, and when she had finished giving everyone their tea, she opened them. And then, while she was reading one, she turned quite pale. The others did not see this, but Clifford, who is an unusually observant boy, saw at once that something was up.

I do not know why it is that it is always breakfast-time letters that contain the really important news of life. But it is so. No one ever hears anything interesting from letters that come by the afternoon post, such as the return of a long-lost relative, or that your house has been burnt to the ground, or exciting events like that.

At first Clifford feared that this letter was from the Police, or the Government, or some other Interfering Person, about our having dammed the Kidbrook. (We had. and it was a great success, but you never know how grown-ups will take such things.)

But when Mother dropped the letter and said, in an excited voice, ‘My darlings! Just listen!’ he knew it was all right.

And really it was. The letter said that a great-uncle of Mother’s, someone she had not seen for years and years, had died leaving her some money and the house he had lived in, complete with furniture and servants and everything desirable. At least, of course the letter didn’t say he had left her the servants, but that he had hoped she would retain their services after he was gone.

At first we could not believe it, and then, when we did, we all began to ask questions about the house. Mother had to say:

‘I don’t know – I don’t know,’ to nearly all of them; but at last she said:

‘Look here! We’ll go today and have a look at it, and you shall all come.’

The house was at Yalding. It was a big red house, furnished with the same kind of lovely things we had had when we were little, before poverty descended upon us like a bolt from the blue.

The house was built when James was King, and that is why it has a flat slab over the front door. I know this sounds silly, but I heard an architect say it once, so I know it must be true. There was a large garden with a red wall, and peaches and nectarines were growing on it. Mother let us each pick one and eat it, there and then. I would rather have one peach that I picked myself with no one to mind how you eat it, than two out of a dish, and be told all the time what you’re not to do with your dessert knife and fork.

Besides the big garden, there was a stream to fish in, and the river not a mile away. Also there were stables, with a loft, and though there was no living thing in the stables we saw at once that they would make a splendid place to play in on wet days.

And when Mother said:

‘I believe I can trace Mike’ (Mike had been our donkey in brighter days), ‘perhaps we will be able to buy him back,’ our cup was indeed full and some of us burst into tears. I will not say who.

Mother wrote the joyful news to Father and told him to come home at once, and in two months’ time he came and we were all together again, with everything as jolly as it could be. Until Madeline.

We were quite ready to be friends with Madeline. She was our cousin from India, and we had all seen her picture in a silver frame on Mother’s bedroom mantelpiece; much too pretty to be at all like, we agreed when we knew her.

We did everything we could to make things nice for Madeline. The girls got sunflowers and nasturtiums to put in the room she was to sleep in, and Martin and I picked three of the plums off the greengage-tree [27]  that is our own, for her. They were not ripe, but that was Madeline’s fault, if anybody’s, for coming before they had time to get soft.

And we sat on the wall in front with the flags that were left over from one of the Blackheath Bazaars, and when the carriage turned in at the gate we waved them and cheered and then shut the gate and tore up the drive after the carriage and passed it, and got there first, and cheered again.

Then Mother got out and we hugged her and she said, ‘Wait till I’ve got Madeline out.’

And she got her out. It was like getting a periwinkle out of its shell. My hat – she was a skinny little rat, and no mistake – more like a young throstle [49]  than anything else – with long, streaky hair and a thin nose that was pink, and clothes that were black – because of a second cousin that she’d never seen, we found out afterwards, and not because of real afflictedness.

We all shook hands with her and the girls kissed her, but she did not seem to enjoy any of it, and when we said, ‘How are you?’ she only sniffed.

I never knew such a kid for sniffing. Mother said it was natural she should be a little downhearted at parting from her mother, and we ought to make allowances – so we made them instantly. But no allowance that ever was allowed would have been enough for the sniffing Madeline. She sniffed at tea and she sniffed at breakfast – she sniffed at the rabbits and the guinea-pigs and even at the cat that had got nine kittens in the stables, and the only time she stopped sniffing at all was when we let her have a ride on the donkey, and then she only stopped to scream ‘I want to get down – I want to get down.’

So Clifford lifted her off, and then she said I’d pinched her arm, and I hoped I had, though I didn’t mean to. And in the middle of dinner she pointed at me – the eldest son of the house and incapable of a mean act – and said right out before everyone, ‘He pinched me.’

Mother looked at me and said, ‘Oh, Clifford – surely you didn’t?’

Of course I wasn’t going to be a sneak just because Madeline was, so I said nothing, only looked silent contempt. The others looked silent contempt too. They understood right enough that their eldest brother hadn’t the kind of nature that stoops to pinch girls, except in play and for their own good.

After dinner we escaped the fell Madeline and had a comfortable jaw all by ourselves on top of the stable-yard wall where it is soft with moss. Years later the present author learned from his Mother that Madeline instantly went and blubbered and said we wouldn’t play with her. But we did not know this baseness at the time.

‘She’s a little beast,’ said Martin; ‘she buzzed those plums at my head because they were sour. Didn’t hit me, of course.’

‘She’s a fair terror,’ Alan said. ‘She cut open a dozen of my cocoons to see what was inside. Duffer that I was to leave them in her bedroom.’

‘She’s an incubator,’ said Carlie.

‘She means incubus,’ said Olive. But when Clifford asked her what that meant she said she didn’t know; she and Carlie had got it out of a book.

‘And it doesn’t matter, anyhow,’ she said – just like a girl – ‘because really whatever she is, she is the stranger within our gates, and we’ve got to be decent to her. You boys will give her another chance, won’t you?’

‘It isn’t chance she wants,’ said Martin with gloominess, ‘it’s manners.’

‘It’s all strange to her,’ said Olive, ‘ and I daresay she feels just as uncomfortable as we do.’

Martin said he was sure he hoped so. I said what did she want us to do?

After some jaw it expired, as newspapers say, that she wanted us to take the little beast fishing.

‘Well,’ said the present writer, ‘if we’ve got to be noble and unselfish for goodness’ sake let’s be it, and get it over.’

So we went fishing. Our punt is kept tied up to the two old willows at the bottom of the baker’s garden. The baker is a friend of ours and knows we can be trusted. If you’ll believe me, that kid pinched seven of the baker’s raspberries before we noticed. I shouldn’t have wondered if no one in Yalding had ever trusted us again. Then we got into the boat and found a nice likely place down the river, and gave her a rod and baited it, and everything we could think of. And then she said she didn’t like worms! And that the boat was full of water!

There wasn’t any water at all in the boat, of course, considering it hadn’t been raining for three days. However, with patient politeness we got the boat back and helped her out and took her home.

When we got quite home and right inside the house, she said we might have emptied the water out, and she wanted to go fishing without any worms on the hook!

Clifford told her quite sensibly exactly how silly she was, and that worms were very interesting pets and very intelligent, compared with some people. She only said, ‘You can keep your nasty old wet worms. I want to go fishing without them.’

The girls would have bent before her silliness like stubble in the blast and started fishing again, but Clifford was firm.

‘No,’ he said, ‘you must draw the line somewhere. And perhaps this will be a lesson to her.’ So he put the bait-tin and tackle on a shelf in the harness-room in case the girls should be silly about it, and went off to see a keeper he knows who has a young fox in a hutch. It is quite tame and I like it.

That night when Clifford got into bed his feet touched something soft and cold and wriggly. You will find it hard to believe that anyone could be so fiend-like, yet so it was. Madeline had somehow contrived to obtain accession to the harness-room shelf, and she had emptied the bait-tin into my bed. If it had been some people, girls, for instance, they would have screamed and gone raving mad on the spot.

This is a disgusting part of my story and I hasten to say no more, only pausing to observe that Clifford slept in blankets that night and there was an imperial row in the morning when the bath was discovered to be full of bait and Clifford’s sheets. But what else was he to do with them, without sneaking, which he is a stranger to?

Clifford was now just about fed up with Madeline. But the girls still said how sad about being parted from her mother, and poor little thing. This continued until she broke the doll’s tea-pot lid at a party and would not say she was sorry. This did for her with Carlie, because it was her tea-pot.

What she did with his silkworms had settled her hash with Alan from the first. She was rather friends with Martin for a little bit, but when she made faces at him at prayers so that he laughed – and then never owned up, though it was bed for him – all was over between them.

Olive was the last to stand up for her. She is as patient as a tortoise generally, but even she gave out after the great Traitor’s Act that sealed the doom of Madeline.

You know, of course, that however happy your home may be, and however fond you are of your kind parents, there are some things that you keep to yourself. Our great secret was the roof. No one knew anything about it but us. Clifford’s bed was an old-fashioned four-poster. What need to own that he was man enough to have climbed on to the top? There was a trap-door up there. It led to the roof, at least to the place between the ceiling and the roof. It was a dark passage pointed at the top, and you had to be jolly careful how you walked or you would have walked through the ceiling below and all would have been at an end – as far as the roof went.

A little way down the passage was a door. It led on to a square leaded place with a grating in one corner that the rain ran down, and the four roofs of the house rose up like a mountainous range on each side. No one knew that we knew of this. It was our desert island. Oft when missed, and called for until all were hoarse, it was there that we lurked.

One day when Mother and Father were going to a dinner-party we decided to have a brigand’s supper on our island. All was got ready in days and days of secret preparingness. We did not tell the hated Madeline till the last moment – but then we did. It was needful because she slept in the girls’ room, and she peeped when they told her not to and thus saw them put their nightgowns over their clothes. So then she wouldn’t go to sleep, and wanted to know why, and sniffed – and the whole plot had to be laid bare.

‘I want to come too,’ was what the girls say she said.

So they let her.

Rash and fatal act!

When the servants were at supper and all was still, the girls came into Clifford’s room, and with them the snivelling Madeline. We had a very fine feast – pears, apples, gingerbread, a bottle of chutney, cheese, bread, raspberry vinegar, a bottle of Florence cream, sponge-cakes, and cinnamon in sticks.

‘I couldn’t help it,’ Olive told me in a whisper. ‘She would come.’

Our family are all good climbers – my great-grandfather was at Trafalgar and learned it among the rigging, I believe – and the bedstead was easy to climb, being arranged for the purpose with carved knobs and leaves and things. But Madeline had never had a relation at a Naval engagement. We had to hoist her on to the top of the tallboys (a tallboys is like two chests of drawers on top of each other, in case you don’t know) and then shove her up to the top of the bed by main force. And the same with getting her through the trap-door. She was clumsy, but perhaps she was born like that – everyone cannot be born with the grace and agility that belonged to our family – and we made allowances, like Mother said.

But when she saw the sort of place she had come up into, all cobwebby and plastery, and looking rather ratty by the light of the candle – though really we never saw so much as a mouse there – she began to sniff and then to cry, and then to scream.

To pop her back through the trap-door was the work of a moment. She fell on the tight-spread damask top of the four-poster. Clifford joined her there, and it was like being in a blanket just before you are tossed. The uncertainness of the damask would not let you stand up. I don’t know how I got her off – but I did, and on to the tallboys. It’s as easy as winking to get off a tallboys – you just walk down by the handles. Not so the ill-fated Madeline. She fell from somewhere about the first long drawer of the top set – and I scorn to deny that there was a bump on her head later, really quite as big as a pigeon’s egg. But to hear her howl you’d have thought it was ostrich-egg size, at least.

Clifford descended like a Greek god from above and got the pillow over her head at the exact moment when Jane knocked at the door with questions about what was up now. Clifford with the greatest presence of mind held the pillow where it was most needed and replied in brave tones:

‘Nothing, thank you. I only dropped something.’

This, besides being true, was generous. Because, of course, he would never have dropped Madeline from the top drawer of a tallboys unless she had kicked and scratched so as to make resistance vain – to her Fate, I mean.

Then the others came down and Clifford took the pillow away, a bit at a time, with earnest promises to put it back if she gave so much as a sniff. She didn’t.

Then we dispersed, concealing the feast on the other side of the secret trap-door.

The soft balm of slumber then fell on all – even the unworthy Madeline.

You will notice that up to now we had done nothing at all to her except try to be nice. So it will show you the baseness she was full of at that time when you hear that next morning, before breakfast, she had told Mother the whole thing, ending up by saying that we had thrown her down on purpose. Mother asked me about it immediately, and I told her the plain truth with what is called a sinking heart. The sink proved to be but too true. We were not punished because, of course, Mother believed my plain truth, but our secret desert island was taken from us – the trap-door was padlocked, and we were forbidden ever to go up there again!

The feast was not collared: it was judged that we had a right to it because we had bought most of it with our own money – except the chutney and the Florence cream and the cinnamon – and Mother let us have that too, only telling us to ask next time before we took things out of the store cupboard. The author has sometimes thought that perhaps Mother was young herself once.

We had the feast in the orchard, Mother agreeing to conceal Madeline about her person for the afternoon. It was at that feast that we first dreamed of doing the Deed.

We held an indignation meeting, for so I believe it is called in the House of Lords. And we were all agreed that something must be done.

‘We can’t have everything muddled up and spoilt like this all our lives,’ Martin said.

‘And it does make me so angry,’ said Olive, ‘and I hate to be angry. I always feel like a piece of chewed string afterwards.’

The rest of us felt the same, and said it. But it was Clifford who was the first to state that something must be done – a decided Deed of some kind.

The question was: What? This gave us food for thought and a good subject for jaw.

Next day Mother took Carlie to stay with our aunt at Maidstone. Clifford from the round attic window watched the carriage drive away. Our young hero looked dreamily out across the street and to the left beheld the wooded slopes of Kent, which is sometimes called the garden of England. There is always a moment when the hero looks out over the landscape of whatever county he happens to be born in, and the ready tears spring unbidden to his eyes. Nothing sprang to this hero’s eyes, but an idea sprang to his brain.

Hastily remarking ‘Got it!’ he tore downstairs, found the others, and proposed a picnic in the woods. He unfolded the Deed to each of the others separately, and every time he unfolded it, it looked better and brighter. Olive was the only one who didn’t see its betterness and brighterness straight off. But she came round and owned that it might be a lesson to Madeline.

What I am now about to relate looks a jolly sight worse now I am telling it than it did when first thought of while smarting under the yoke of the detested Madeline. It was. . .

I am getting on too fast.

We had the picnic; we got the tea-basket and cakes and plums and took them in the donkey-cart to the woods, the woodiest woods we knew.

Here we had tea – it would have been jolly but for the Deed we had come to that dark wood to do. Olive couldn’t eat anything, hardly, but we had to have tea before doing the dark Deed, because we did not want to starve the repelling Madeline as well as. . . The author does not seem able to help getting along faster than he wants. I want the Deed to come upon you with a great surprise, like it did on the unpopulous Madeline.

We were very cold with Madeline, and she was beastly grumpy with us. (If she were telling the tale she would put it the other way round. Let us be fair.)

When tea was over there was a silence.

Now, when the moment had really come for the Deed, I think we all rather thought perhaps it would be better not. But Madeline sniffed, and her die was cast.

Clifford had been chosen to make the last speech before the execution. He said:

‘Madeline, you have been a beast to us ever since you came.’

‘Not worse than you’ve been to me,’ said Madeline.

Clifford made no reply, but told her all the things she’d done, from buzzing the plums at Martin to putting worms in the snow-white couch of Clifford. She sniffed, but said nothing.

‘Did you,’ Clifford then said, ‘ever read Hop o’ my Thumb?’

She owned that she had.

‘Well,’ said Clifford, ‘we’re going for a drive, and you can stay here and think about Hop o’ my Thumb. Because we’re going to leave you here. See? We’ve had jolly well enough of you!’

Still she made no reply.

So we put the things in the basket and the basket in the cart. We put the donkey in the cart too.

Then Madeline said: ‘Auntie said I ought to play tricks and be jolly and try to be more like you. I thought putting worms in beds was just the sort of trick you’d do yourself.’

‘It’s not the beastly worms,’ said Clifford. ‘You know that that was forgiven. It’s your being such a measly little sneak. Every single thing that happens you go and blab to Mother. You’re a tell-tale-tit, if ever there was one.’

‘Oh, how I hate you!’ Madeline then remarked with fury. ‘I wish you were all dead. I always tell Mother everything. And I’ll tell her about you. You see if I don’t.’

‘You can’t,’ said Clifford; ‘she’s in India.’ He does really wish he had not said that. He minds having said that more than anything.

Then we all got into the cart and drove away. Olive had been finishing harnessing the donkey and had not heard our parting words or, as she told us many times afterwards till we were sick of hearing it, she would never have gone.

We drove off, leaving Madeline alone in her black frock in the green wood. She looked very small and disagreeable. And as we went Alan shouted:

‘You won’t be able to find your way home like Hop o’ my Thumb did!’

And Martin shouted: ‘Lost in the wood! Lost in the wood!’ till we were out of sight.

Then we put our noble steed to the gallop and drove off. We were silent after that shouting, and the author has since learned that all the others felt exactly as he did, only none of us liked to say so, because we had all agreed beforehand that being lost in a wood would serve Madeline jolly well right, and be a lesson to her, and we did not like to appear milksops in each other’s eyes. At least, I think that was it. Because now it came to having done the Deed it looked very different; and we went on in an awful silence.

Quite soon, and much sooner than we had meant, Clifford turned our steed’s head and we went back, to find Madeline and explain that it was only a joke, for her own good.

‘Do drive fast,’ Olive said. ‘Oh, I do wish we hadn’t. Suppose she’s gone mad with terror!’

‘Or drowned herself in the pond,’ said Martin.

‘Or been carried off by bears,’ said Alan.

Clifford said, ‘Don’t talk rot. There aren’t any bears, and we haven’t been gone half an hour! There hasn’t been time for anything to happen.’

But there had. We got back to the wood, to the place where we had left her. She was not there. We shouted: ‘Madeline!’ And she didn’t answer. So then we tied up the steed and went deeper into the wood to look for her.

We could not find her.

We looked all about – among the bracken and hazel and sweet chestnut – and we called, and called. The writer got very hot, and then he got very cold, and all the awful things he had read came back to him, about people lost in woods, and he felt perfectly sick. He got wilder and wilder in his manner, I believe, and ran all over the wood, which is fortunately small, till there wasn’t a bush he hadn’t looked under, and his hair was sticking to his forehead with apprehensiveness. The others have since confessed that it was the same with them. It became evening, then nearly dark, and at last Clifford coo-eed, and we met, a mangled band of malefactors, by the donkey’s brow.

‘Oh,’ said Olive, out of breath, ‘how could we be so awful! Oh, whatever shall we do? Oh, where can she be?’

‘People have been hanged for less, I believe,’ said Martin.

‘But nothing can have happened to her,’ Alan would keep on saying.

‘Something has,’ said Clifford. And then the sudden glorious idea occurred to him.

‘Perhaps she’s gone home!’

The donkey went back on the wings of the wind instead of in the usual way. I think he was never more surprised in his life.

We tore into the house like a whirlwind in deep anxiety.

All was still as a marble mausoleum. The servants were out in the yard talking to the gardener.

We searched the house. We thought perhaps she was hiding, to frighten us. But she was not hiding there, for that or any other reason.

Then Mother came home. We do not have supper with her and Father, but in the schoolroom while they have dinner.

In happier days we hated not having meals with them. Now in our despair we were glad of it. We decided that we must tell when we went in to say goodnight, because then Mother would say ‘Where’s Madeline?’

But she never said it, and we were so surprised that we got out of the room without breathing the name of the lost one. I thought Mother looked very odd, somehow, and different.

We went slowly upstairs. On the big landing where the stuffed foxes are, we stopped and looked at each other.

‘I believe Mother knows,’ said Olive.

‘Do you think Madeline. . . ?’

‘If anything has happened to her,’ said Martin, ‘Mother will save us, like a Royalist lady in a book.’

‘If anything has happened they wouldn’t know so soon,’ said Alan; ‘it takes days to drag a pond properly, I believe.’

Olive said, ‘Oh, don’t! I don’t care what you say, I’m going to tell Mother.’ We refused, of course, to allow this. We were all in it, and we weren’t going to let Olive collar any extra let-off for being the first to own up.

So we went down – and a whispered council outside the drawing-room door ended in Clifford, who is the eldest, putting his head in at the door and saying:

‘Please, Mother, can we speak to you a minute?’

And she came out directly, as she always does.

Then we told her, standing in the shadow of the hat-stand as much as we could.

I shall not tell you what Mother said. It was said to us and not to anyone else. And, besides, though very awful, it wasn’t any worse than what our inside selves had been saying to us for unending hours and hours.

And when it was done Olive took hold of Mother and shook her – she did really – and cried out: ‘Oh, yes, Mother – but never mind all that. What do you think’s happened to her? If anything’s happened to her I’ll go into a convent – yes, I will.’ And with that she loudly howled.

Boys do not howl, however criminal, but I know what we felt like. Mother then put her arm round Olive, and uttered the following rememorable words:

‘There, there! I see you’re sorry. Madeline’s all right!’

It was then revealed that Mother had found Madeline in the road, crying and kicking her shoes in the dust. Mother saw there had been a worse row than usual, so she took the ill-starred Madeline in the carriage to Maidstone, and left her with Aunt Evelyn.

‘And you never told us, Mother,’ we could not help saying.

‘Well, dears,’ said Mother, ‘do you think you deserved to be told – until you asked? But I’ll tell you one thing without your asking. Madeline never told of you. I asked if there had been a quarrel, and she said No – she had just missed you in the wood and couldn’t find you. It wasn’t true, of course, but I don’t think you can call her a sneak after that.’

•      •      •      •

We never have. She came back next day, and the present writer would never have believed he could be so glad to see any sniveller as he was to see Madeline, safe and sound and uninjured by the Deed. The others felt the same.

I have never said so to Mother or anyone else, and I am very sorry about the Deed in the Wood, because it was five to one and most unsportsmanlike, as Father said when it came to his turn to jaw us about it; but I can’t help seeing that what we said and did in that wood instantly made Madeline cease sneaking. Of course I am not quite sure that the speeches would not have been enough without the Deed, but then I am not at all sure that they would.

In the joy of nothing’s having happened to her we were jollier than before to Madeline, I believe. Mother said this made her jollier to us. But I’m not sure about that either. She certainly was jollier.

And somehow we get on fairly all right with her now.

And her sniffs were not intendedness, we have since learned, but hay-fever, which kings themselves have been subject to, and unable to command. Knowing this made us able to bear them better, though still irritating at times.

But suppose there had never been a Deed? Mightn’t she have gone on being a sneak? And us not being jolly to her? The author concludes with a question from the poets: ‘Who can tell?’

The life of the human race is full of problems that haven’t got any answers, as the late Euclid has so truly said.

CHAPTER SEVEN.

The Madness of Madeline

You know in history the things that happen are kings being born and dying and getting married and wars and pestilences. When you are not in history but in your own life, you do not generally have much to do with kings; but the wars and the pestilences – I mean the rows and the illnesses – go on just the same for the humblest persons outside history. If it were not for these things there would be an awful sameness in most people’s lives.

I do not mean that I like illnesses and rows, but if you look back on the most exciting events of your life, nice or nasty, you will find that many of them happened just before a row or after an illness. Think it over and you will see that I am right. Perhaps one reason why pestilences – measles and so on – are good for adventures is that the ones of you who haven’t got it, whatever it is, are always sent away to get you out of the way so that you shouldn’t get it. Thus you go to new places and new kinds of adventures come your way. Perhaps – but I won’t go on because what I have written is beginning to look like a prize essay, and it is really a story about what happened to us when the others had the scarlet fever. And it wasn’t exactly an adventure either. More like an event. But I will not anticipate. And I will not say whether it is nasty or nice.

We went to stay with our Uncle Edward, who is a doctor. And I am sorry to say we did not feel our blessings. Though quite all right when at home the doctor uncle is out more and at odder times than ordinary relations. So that we were rather bored. Some people think that children cannot be bored. They little know. Quite a lot of things that look like being naughty are just from being bored. But a truce to this going on like an essay.

We were bored. It was our being bored that led to the adventure or event I am now unfolding.

It was the autumn when it was so wet. It rained for weeks, I think. And you could not play in the garden, and it is difficult to play in the house if it is not your own house and you haven’t got your own things there and you are expected not to make any noise at all. It was a jolly big house with lots of curiosities all over it, and bronze elephants on the dining-room sideboard. And a surgery for making medicines in, very interesting with different coloured bottles, and pestles, and mortars, and scales, and a balance, and a machine for nipping corks, and one for cutting up pills, and pill-boxes, and the round wooden boxes so useful for keeping specimens in. I liked it best of all the rooms, but you aren’t allowed there without a grown-up. I used to think when I was little that grownups spent their time in finding out what you liked and then saying ‘Don’t.’ But I know now that this is not always the case.

There were only Martin and I there and our cousin Madeline. The others were all at home in scarlet secludedness with the dreadful fever of that name.

‘Going on very well. No danger,’ Father told us in a letter that smelt of the wet sheets they hang up outside your door if it is anything catching.

We were sick of halma [29], ludo, [38], and all the games we knew. Also of drawing, and writing letters to the wretched sufferers, because of course they were not able to write letters back even if it had been allowed in the catching state they were in.

Of course Martin and I had more larks [37]  with each other than we had with Madeline; and I wish to be quite fair and own that she was a bit out of it. She is such a white mouse of a girl, and after all Martin and I are both boys. So you see it was quite natural.

There is something about being bored that makes you kick the furniture. This annoys grown-ups very much, even if it doesn’t leave any mark. It was after our uncle had said what he did about our boots that Martin and I decided to go for a long explore and try to find Epping Forest, which someone told us was not so very far away. We did not take Madeline because Mrs. Peard, the housekeeper, said on no account with her cold.

Madeline sniffed with furious disappointedness, and Martin said:

‘Nonsense; it’s better for only one to be wretched and the other two to be all right, instead of us all being blighted together.’ And Clifford said: ‘Of course it is. Besides, I feel as if I might become like Nero if I don’t get out of this. We might pull your hair or pinch you if we didn’t go, Mads. Cheer up and be a man.’

But she said she couldn’t and she’d be even with us yet, and we felt perhaps it would be good for her to have to buck up all by herself, and we went out.

‘But suppose I was to get like Nero?’ she said the last thing before we went. But we did not think that likely.

We did not find the forest, only rows and rows and rows of horrid little streets all browny yellow and all just alike. And rain all the time. When we were quite wet through we went back and caught it hot from Mrs. Peard. But we both felt better. Only Madeline didn’t seem to. When Mrs. Peard had finished giving it to us and making us change our things to the bedrock, we found Madeline sitting on the stairs seemingly a prey to wild despair. Her face was very dirty and she sniffed and gulped more than usual.

‘What is the matter?’ we did not say, because if you do the sniffs and gulps turn into howls. Instead we prodded her with our indoor shoes’ toes to make her get up, and we all went down into the dining-room and looked out of the window.

‘It’s been raining like this all the time you’ve been away,’ said Madeline, as if we didn’t know that a jolly sight better than she did.

‘Aren’t you sorry you didn’t take me?’ she said. And we said, ‘No, we weren’t.’

‘Or stay with me?’ she asked. And we said no to that too. And then it was tea-time. After tea we all got books. It is one of those houses where if your uncle is out, every day feels like Sunday afternoon or being in disgrace. Madeline had Hereward the Wake, but I could see she was not reading him. I said:

‘I say, Mads; you’re not stuffy with us for going out, are you?’

And she replied: ‘I don’t know what you mean by stuffy. But perhaps if you hadn’t gone out I wouldn’t have done it.’ We both put our books down because this sounded interesting. But do you think she’d tell us what she had done? No. Not though we asked and asked, and at last Martin, unable to bear it, offered her his new fountain-pen if she’d tell. She is an aggravating girl, more even than most girls, I mean. She would not take the pen.

I should not have done it myself because I know what girls are, and you have to put up with them. But if Martin did twist her arm after that to make her tell I am not one to throw stones in my heart – though outwardly I had to tell him home truths about being a sneak and a rotter and all that. So there was a regular row and Mrs. Peard pounced on us and sent us all to bed.

It must have been very late, quite ten or eleven, when I was awakened by a strange sound, more like a large and very clumsy mouse than anything else.

I held my breath and listened, and the sound was repeated. It was quite dark, and Clifford owns that he had then wished that he had not been so sure about no night-light the first evening when Mrs. Peard asked if we wanted any.

He sat up in bed and said: ‘Who’s there?’ just to show himself that he was not frightened. But he never expected anyone to answer and say who was there, and it was perfectly awful when a voice out of the darkness whispered, ‘It’s me.’

He answered nothing, and the mouse-like noise began again. So then he got out of bed – he is a stranger to fear really, except when suddenly alarmed – and he found the matches and lighted the gas and blinked round the room. And there was Madeline with her hair in curl rags standing at the door on which she had been scratching.

‘What on earth?’ said Clifford, very cross.

‘I scratched to wake you,’ said Madeline.

‘You’d much better have shaken me or buzzed pillows at my head,’ said Clifford. ‘What’s up?’

‘I am,’ said Madeline. ‘I’ve been up ages. I thought you would never wake.’

‘Well, I am awake now,’ said our hero; ‘what’s the matter?’

‘I can’t tell you here,’ she said. ‘The servants are next door, you know. They might hear what we’re saying. Come down to the landing.’

‘Is it burglars?’ said Clifford courageously.

‘I think you’ll think it’s worse than that, ever so much worse,’ said Madeline darkly.

Clifford always puts his boots on if he thinks it is burglars. It is the least you can do. He put them on now though Madeline had said it wasn’t, and his greatcoat, and then rejoined the hideous-looking Madeline, and the two crept down together to the first landing, where the gas was turned down to a blue bead. So it was, down in the hall. The doctor uncle always leaves it on in case of people being ill in the night and coming to fetch him in a hurry.

‘Go ahead,’ said Clifford, burrowing his ears in his greatcoat. ‘And if this is a plant you’ll be sorry, that’s all.’

‘I haven’t any heart for plants,’ said the miserable Madeline. ‘Suppose I was as good as a murderer, don’t you think you ought to know?’

Clifford said not to drivel but out with it. He was chilly and sleepy. He hopes he was not cross; he tried to understand. But you know what girls are, making a fuss about the inmost secrets of the heart at the wrong times.

‘I’m not drivelling,’ said Madeline, ‘not in the least. I mean—’

She stopped dead short.

‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean—’ Once more the dead shortness occurred.

‘You mean you said you wished someone was dead? Well, you oughtn’t to because they might be, and then how would you feel?’

My father told me this, and I thought it might do Madeline good.

‘I never did any such thing,’ she indignantly answered. ‘I do think you’re horrid.’

‘Well,’ said Clifford, dreadfully patient, but raging inside, ‘go ahead.’

You will find it difficult to believe, but Madeline then said:

‘No, I won’t go ahead. I thought I could tell you, but I can’t. Go back to bed, Clifford.’

Now what’s the use of a girl like that? Clifford tried to get her to tell, remembering that he was what his own headmaster calls in loco parentis [33]  because of Madeline’s mother being so remote in the wilds of India. But it was no good. She only said, ‘No, no, no’ about seventy times and then went back into her room and slammed the door in a whisper.

Our hero went back to bed not pleased. The next day the doctor uncle was not called out at breakfast-time. So he had brek with us and it was jolly. He was more like the uncle who comes and stays with us. We had pineapple jam and two large piles of buttered toast, besides the dry bits in the toast-rack and the marmalade of ordinary life. But Madeline only took the dry kind of toast, and only one piece of that, and no pineapple jam at all. So Clifford knew that the snivelling events of the night before were not a dream, which he had thought they were at first when he woke up in the morning and remembered how in the deep midnight hours the giant mouse had scratched.

‘I did mean,’ said Uncle Edward, when he had finished all the breakfast he wanted, ‘to suggest an afternoon at the local Hippodrome [31], but some of my patients are not as well as could be expected. No Hippodrome for us, I’m afraid. . . . Never mind; better luck next time.’

We said thank you very much.

This endearing uncle, for such he now was, then put his hand in his pocket and pulled out a lot of mixed money, some of it was gold. Out of the mixture he picked three separate half-crowns and gave one to each of us with the remark: ‘Have a little jollification amongst yourselves to make up for the loss of the Hippodrome – sounds like the loss of the Royal George – what?’ and went out quickly because the telephone bell was going like mad.

Martin and I had an interesting discussion about what we should do with our money. Martin thought rabbits. But Clifford thought something more splendid than mere rabbitry might be effected with the three half-crowns if we put them together.

‘We could get a football,’ he said, ‘or a set of full-sized ship’s quoits.’ [44]

‘Or a pistol,’ Martin said, ‘and pop at the cats.’

There are a great many cats at Charrington. ‘Or a pair of roller-skates and take it in turns on the asphalt,’ Clifford observed.

‘Or a clock-work engine,’ said Martin; ‘three half-crowns is seven-and-sixpence.’ All this time Madeline had said nothing, only made little heaps of toast crumbs on her plate and flattened them down with the spoon belonging to the egg she had hardly eaten at all. And now Clifford thought it would be only polite to intrude her in the conversation, especially as it was her half-crown too. So he said:

‘What do you say, Mads? Hadn’t we better club together and get something decent we can all play?’ There was no harm in that. It was kind of Clifford. But Madeline got red and then white – a greeny sort of white, and then she said very softly and slowly:

‘I don’t play rabbits, or pistols, or football, or skates, or any of your old games. You never asked me before, all the time we’ve been here. And besides, I don’t want the nasty half-crown. You can keep it yourself if you want it so much. So there!’ she added very loud and went out and slammed the door. Slammed not in a whisper this time, but in a perfect shout.

Martin and the present author were left looking at each other over Madeline’s half-crown.

‘What on earth—?’ said Martin.

‘I don’t know,’ replied our hero, and then he proceeded to tell his young brother about last night and the giant mouse-scratching that turned out to be the silly, timid fingernails of the dish – dishavailed – it’s no good, I can’t spell Latin – Madeline.

‘Well, I think you ought to have told Uncle Edward,’ said Martin; ‘I don’t care what you say. I expect she’s going to have the scarlet, and this is the fever of deliriousness beginning.’

Our hero had not thought of this, for a wonder, though some people say he is unusually intelligent for a boy of his age. But he wasn’t going to tell his young brother he hadn’t thought of it. So he said:

‘Rats! It’s not deliriousness. It’s just her natural Madness coming out again. You know right enough Mother said we’d got to make allowances.’

‘I’ll make allowances right enough,’ said Martin, who sometimes thinks he is being clever; ‘what I can’t make, is anything out of it at all,’ he went on. He will never let a thing alone even if it was not so bad to begin with.

‘Well,’ said Clifford, and I think it was rather decent of him considering he is the eldest, ‘I don’t mind telling Uncle at lunch-time if you like.’

Of course this made Martin say:

‘Don’t you be in such a precious hurry. Suppose she really meant something, and we sneaked.’

It did not seem likely that she had meant anything, but Clifford tried to suppose it. I think myself the event was too serious for dipping lumps of sugar in the milk-jug and sucking them. Martin did this, but then he is not so old as I am.

‘If she does,’ he said stickily, ‘it’s most likely something we’ve done and forgotten, and she thinks she’s in it – like Olive when we took the owl’s nest and she looked on and told us not to, and then cried because it was she who’d told us where it was, so it was her fault.’

There was something in this and Clifford owned it handsomely.

‘Look here,’ said Martin, ‘suppose I go and try and get it out of her?’

‘I tried,’ said Clifford, with gloomy signification.

‘Yes, I know. But that was on the landing in the dark; and I expect she was cross with scratching at the door so long. You do sleep like a pig.’

‘I don’t sleep like a steam-roller, anyhow,’ said Clifford.

‘It’s only when I’ve got a cold. You know that well enough,’ said Martin. ‘Oh don’t let’s rag. I’ll go and try the gentle arts on the Maddy-bird. We’ve got to get on somehow. It’s no use just marking time and hitting out at each other.’

So he went. And Clifford absently dipped lumps of sugar in the milk and sucked them. But it was only to keep from doing nothing while waiting. You know who finds some mischief still for idle hands to do, don’t you? He would not have done it during a council like Martin did. But we cannot all be heroes.

I own he never thought Martin would have any luck, but quite soon he came back and Madeline was with him.

‘She’s going to tell us,’ he said. ‘We are her best friends. I’ve explained that to her. And if we can help her we will.’

‘You won’t tell?’ Madeline asked; and we asked her what she took us for.

‘Well,’ said Madeline, ‘I’ll tell you if you really want me to. It was yesterday when you went out in the rain. I did think it was too horrid of you leaving me here. I know I’m a girl, but I can’t help that, and if you’d been a girl and I’d had thick boots and my hair short I wouldn’t have deserted you.’

This made Clifford uncomfortable. Martin told him afterwards that it did him too.

‘Men must work and women must weep,’ said Clifford, which is his favourite motto; and Madeline said:

‘I don’t see it. And I didn’t weep. I just went round and round the house like the thing in the riddle, and upstairs and downstairs like “Goosey-gander.”’

‘You’re wandering,’ said Clifford gently.

‘Wandering? I should think I was,’ said our cousin I was in loco parentis to. ‘You’d have wandered if you’d been left alone in a strange house a day like that. I wrote to Mother and tidied my chest of drawers and folded all my dresses properly and did my hair three times. And there was nothing more in the whole world to do. So I did my hair again, in a different way.’

She stopped, and Clifford said ‘Go on. We’re yours to the death.’ And she said: ‘Oh, no, you’re not’; and stopped again. ‘We are, really,’ said Martin, ‘only do go ahead.’

‘When I couldn’t think of anything to do for ages and ages and ages I went into the dispensary. You know the bench where they put all the different bottles of medicine for ill people. Only no corks. The boy puts them in afterwards and does them up in white paper and sealing-wax. And writes the names outside. And. Pink. String.’ She was getting slower and slower, like a musical box that is running down.

We wound her up again by saying: ‘Well. Fire ahead.’

‘I wish,’ said Madeline, ‘I could make you understand.’ She screwed her eyes up very tight and made faces with the downstairs part of her countenance. ‘It was so – so – so – I don’t know. As if everything had been going on always and was going on forever. I wanted things not to go on like that. The clock kept ticking – the one in the surgery – a different tune – time, I mean – and the kitchen clock too, because the servants were all dressing, except Esther, and she was out at the back with the fishmonger, because she is going to marry him as soon as they can get the little home together, and—’

‘Madeline,’ said our hero in low, fierce tones, ‘if you don’t tell us what happened – I don’t believe anything did really – Martin and I will go out for the whole day and take out our dinner with us. Uncle Edward said we might any time we wanted to, and we may come back late. Or perhaps if we find a hut in the forest we shan’t come back at all. Now then!’

‘All right,’ Madeline said in a hurry. ‘I wanted to mix the medicines all up.’

‘You what?’

‘I wanted to mix them all up. And I mixed all the things in the different bottles. There’s a big white jug in the surgery with sort of blue ribbon bands on it. Well, I poured the insides of the bottles in the jug and I got a spoon out of the kitchen and stirred them up. And when they were mixed up I filled up the bottles again.’

‘Do you mean,’ said Martin slowly, ‘you mixed them all? So that people that have got scarlet fever will get all sorts of other illnesses’ medicines, and so will the typhoids and the whooping-coughs and the bronchitises and the housemaid’s knees and the skyatticas?’

‘I read it once in a book,’ said Madeline, ‘what’s one man’s meat is another man’s poison, and of course it’s much more so with medicine.’

There was a pause. Like taking a deep breath before you go in at the deep end at the swimming-bath.

Then Clifford said – quite broken he was, no strength at all, none of the strong power that generally makes him what he is – ‘What did you do it for? What did you do it for?’ And Madeline answered:

‘I don’t know what I wanted to do it for. To have something happen, I think. For it not to go on just like clocks ticking and you out and the servants dressing and those bottles standing there.’

Clifford let go of Madeline’s hand and he walked all round the dining-table before he replied:

‘Didn’t you think. . . If some of the bottles – were any of them blue? Had they got red labels on?’ he asked hastily. ‘Poison labels?’ said Martin.

And the wretched Madeline said, ‘I don’t know.’

Gentle reader, what would you have done? Told your uncle? Well, you see, we solicited the information from the wretched Madeline that all the bottles of medicine had gone out at three o’clock yesterday. And most of them were a sixth part every hour, so nearly five-sixths of the stuff had already been lapped up by the suffering patients of the doctor uncle.

‘But aren’t there anecdotes?’ Martin said; ‘things you give to stop the medicine doing what it’s made up it’s mind to do? Couldn’t Uncle. . . ?’

At this point Madeline uttered a strange choking sound and rushed from the room.

Dear reader, I daresay we were wrong, but you know how boys are, being taught so very carefully that they mustn’t sneak whatever happens. And somehow Clifford could not bring himself to believe that there was anything in Uncle’s medicine that would hurt anybody even if it wasn’t exactly what he meant for that particular illness. All the same it was the kind of day that I don’t want to have happen again. Clifford and Martin did not mean to shun Madeline, but it turned out just as though they had. Clifford met her twice, once on the stairs and once coming out of the bathroom, where she had been washing her face, not before it was wanted, I should say. And both times she said:

‘Aren’t you sorry you left me alone that day?’

The second time that happened Clifford felt about fed up with the whole thing, and he said:

‘Look here, you’ve got to tell Uncle.’ But Madeline said, ‘No, I shan’t,’ in a hollow voice.

And Clifford had to remember that the bottles had gone out the day before, so the mischief was done. At dinner, which is the middle of the day and the same as grownups’ lunch, our hero said to his uncle in as bluff a way as he could assume:

‘Well, Uncle, and how are all your patients?’

‘Some better – some worse,’ was the reply. ‘Why do you ask?’

‘Oh, something to say, you know,’ said Clifford, bluffer than ever – like the old sea-dogs who never blench in the face of danger.

‘Perhaps Cliff thought they might all be cured,’ said Martin, which he needn’t have done, and almost at the same time Madeline said in a voice more like the squeak of a sixpenny toy than anything human:

‘It’s polite to ask after people.’

‘Very,’ said Uncle Edward. ‘You’re not getting on with your dinner, Madeline. What’s the matter?’

‘Nothing, thank you, Uncle,’ she said, putting her knife and fork together and trying to hide undesired mutton under them.

The afternoon was awful, and though Clifford and Martin played draughts continuously there was but little relief in this. It is a rotten game at the best of times, I think, and when in sorrow no go at all.

Years seemed to roll on before it was tea-time. But at last it was and the bell rang for it. Clifford and his brother turned up all right for it, and Uncle Edward, by some strange miracle, was at home for tea though he had said he would not be.

And there was toast and cake and pineapple jam and marmalade, but no Madeline. The uncle had the tea bell rung again and then sent Mrs. Peard to look for his missing niece. Her search was unprevailing. Madeline was not to be found in the house. She was not in the garden. She was not in the garage, nor yet in the loft nor the yard. She had vanished away ‘like a beautiful dream,’ if you leave out one word, and Clifford and Martin exchanged meaning looks while they thought the uncle was not looking.

‘She must have run away,’ said Martin.

‘But where could she have run to?’ said Uncle, getting on his overcoat to set out to look for her.

‘Home,’ said Martin.

‘But why should she?’ Clifford now felt it was his duty to ask.

The uncle’s only remark was to tell us to stow it and get on our boots sharp and go out and join in the chase.

So we did, leaving the rich muffins untasted. (When we came back it had all been cleared away, but that is like life.)

As soon as our boots were on we went out in the cold, foggy dusk. I hate twilight, that people in poetry make such a fuss about. And we looked up and down the road, and there was a muffin-man with a green baize [02]  tray, and a lamplighter, but no Madeline.

Then Clifford – think what you like of him for it, but, indeed, our boy hero was desperate – said to the doctor uncle: ‘I believe she’s gone to the police-station.’

‘What for?’ was the natural question from the uncle.

‘Because of what she did yesterday,’ Clifford recklessly replied.

After this concealment was at an end and the uncle, standing in the foggy street, soon knew as much as we did. He could not believe it. And the author owns that believing things like that about girls who look so namby-pamby as Madeline is indeed hard work. But he had to in the end. So then, of course, we went to the police-station. It has a blue light over the door and you get an awful feeling when you go in there that you will never come out again except to be incorporated in prisons and Reforming Homes.

‘Have you seen a little girl?’ the uncle asked a man in blue uniform who got behind a desk when he saw us coming, and took a pen out of his ear to write down anything we might say. There was a lot of gas very clear and bright, that seemed to be trying to light up your most secret thoughts. Clifford turned cold to the ends of his fingers and his feet because in the agitation of the moment he hadn’t sworn the uncle to secrecy. And perhaps mixing bottles is a felonous deed and ends in dungeons. But he needn’t have been afraid. When the inspector said that he hadn’t seen any little girl the uncle said:

‘I thought not. But it was as well to ask. Some childish prank, I expect.’ Another inspector said:

‘Quite so, sir. Boys will be boys. I mean girls, that is to say. Quite so, sir.’ And we came away.

Then we began to look for Madeline. We looked and we looked and we looked. It was dreadful. There are quite a lot of streets in Charrington. All exactly alike. At first we kept thinking we might see her round the next corner, and the next, and the next. And by and by Clifford’s inside mind said to him:

‘You won’t find her round any corner. You see if you do.’

And of course we didn’t.

It was dreadful, as I said. But it was very exciting, too. I don’t mean that we enjoyed it. Of course we couldn’t have. But it was more like that than anything else.

For hours we looked. The uncle told every policeman what we were looking for. And at last he said:

‘Well, you kids must go to bed, anyhow.’ We did not see this at all. We said we would gladly stay up all night and go on looking for our long-lost cousin.

But Uncle Edward was deaf to our unselfish protestings. So we all went home.

We had supper. I hope it was not unfeeling of us to eat quite a lot. But it was cold beef and pickles, and you know from Tom Brown’s School-days how boys feel about them. But though our hero was not at all off his oats, yet his heart was sad for the missing child.

When he passed her bedroom door on his way to bed he went in through the partly opened door and lit the gas on purpose to say:

‘Poor Madeline, I wonder where she is?’

And then he got the shock of his life. For she was there. Sitting up in bed and looking at him.

He yelled. He scorns to deny it. Any chap would have. And the boots of the others were heard upon the stairs.

Directly afterwards the room was full of Uncle, Martin, Mrs. Peard and the author.

‘Where have you been?’ the uncle sternly asked Madeline.

‘In – in the boot cupboard,’ said the embedded Madeline. ‘You said you wouldn’t be at home all day.’

‘Why did you hide?’ Uncle Edward asked, still as stern as stern.

‘To be even with the boys. To scare them,’ said Madeline, pale but spiteful. ‘To be even with them for going out and leaving me all alone here. And I did it, too!’

The uncle looked sterner than ever – like the headmaster when he tells you it hurts him more than it does you. He spoke with withering sarcasm.

‘I suppose that’s why you mixed the different bottles of medicine. Do you know you might have killed someone?’

‘Oh, you sneaks! You hateful sneaks!’ cried the incumbent Madeline; ‘and I didn’t mix the bottles of medicine, anyhow.’

‘You said you did,’ said Clifford, who wasn’t going to be called sneaks for nothing.

‘I never did,’ said Madeline, who was in bed; ‘I said I had mixed up what was in the bottles on the bench. There weren’t but only two. They were soaking. They were just being washed out. Now then!’

‘But you knew we thought. . .’

‘Why did you want us to believe. . . ? said our hero and his brother together.

‘To pay you out for leaving me alone,’ said Madeline. ‘You always say I never think of anything, and that I’m a white rabbit or a mouse. But you see I can think of things, only I don’t always do what I think of. And I don’t care what you do to me. So there!’

With these words she burrowed under her bedclothes and from the blankety mound we heard sniffs and snivellings. The uncle took us by the collar and turned us out of the room.

We went downstairs and told each other that it wasn’t our fault anyhow, and Madeline was a duffer.

When the uncle came down he said:

‘I thought you could be trusted to be jolly to that poor kid, and her mother in India and all. But I see I was wrong.’

Our hero nearly burst into feelings of boiled-up unjustness, and Martin said: ‘She ought to have five hundred lines. But I suppose it’s our fault, as usual.’

‘Don’t be cheeky,’ [12]  said Uncle Edward, much more kindly though. ‘I think it is your fault. She’s a girl, you see.’

‘Yes,’ said Clifford, ‘I see we ought to have remembered she was only a girl.’

‘She’s the stranger within your gates, too,’ said the uncle. ‘What’s more, she’s a highly-strung, imaginative child. Just think – you must have some imagination – how unhappy she must have been to invent and carry out a plan like this.’

Clifford rolled and unrolled the corner of the hearthrug with his foot and said he always thought revenge was wrong. And his uncle said he was a prig. I have forgiven him now.

Then he lectured us. And we hated it. And he saw we did.

And at last he said:

‘Look here, old chaps. If you’d heard what Madeline said to me you wouldn’t take it like this. Don’t you see that it’s because she’s so fond of you that she hated you leaving her alone so. You don’t understand girls yet. But you take it from me that it’s so. And let’s forgive and forget and not say any more about it, any of us. Shall we?’

Of course we said yes. But meeting next day with the now repentant Madeline was more than you can possibly imagine. It was like taking part in a play when you have forgotten your part.

But in the afternoon the uncle took us to the Hippodrome, and after that all was really forgotten and forgiven.

When Clifford thought it over afterwards he saw that though very wrong of Madeline it was really rather clever. For she didn’t tell any lies. And yet she made us awfully uncomfortable. It was what Boers call slim, I think.

We were as nice to her as we knew how, and the next Sunday after she said:

‘Look here, I’m sorry. I’ll never do anything like it again. But if you’d only sometimes be kind to me I wouldn’t mind what you did.’

‘What do you mean by kind?’ said Clifford coldly. ‘If you’d only say what you want there’d be some chance of your getting it.’

‘I like it when you say “Mads, old boy.” Or “Mads, old chap,”’ she said, ‘and thump me on the back.’

So now we say and do these things as often as we can remember to. Because after all she is our cousin, and India is a long way off.

CHAPTER EIGHT.

The Mysterious House

in the Wood

What the author is about to relate happened in the summer holidays. Miss Knox was staying with us. When she has been staying in the house a little while everyone gets restless. And you feel that it is silly to stay at home when there are so many other places in the world where Miss Knox isn’t. People who invite her to stay with them ought to have several establishments so that they can go and stay at the other ones during her visits.

‘It is rum [46] ,’ said Clifford, who is often the one to begin to talk of new objects, ‘how you feel about things. The Knox is a vampire, I think.’

‘What’s a vampire?’ Carlie asked.

Olive very quickly said, ‘A bat, dear,’ and winked frownfully through the leaves. We were in the apple tree  – secure from anyone creeping up behind. I do not mean to say that the Knox means to be always behind you, but she has an idea that she must take care of us, and so somehow she too often is.

‘What I mean is,’ said Clifford, ‘she sucks your patience out of you and lives on it herself. That’s why people call her a sweet, patient, earnest worker. That beady lady who called yesterday in the brougham did.’

‘It’s not so much your patience – it’s your temper that goes,’ said Olive, and Martin owned that Miss Knox made him want to scream and go mad before her eyes. ‘I feel it most at meal times,’ he added darkly.

‘Whatever’s the use of jawing,’ Alan said, ‘when you know quite well you’ve just got to stick it? Let’s go fishing.’

‘Yes, let’s,’ said the others, even Madeline, who has grown in sense while living with us. But Clifford did not.

‘I was thinking,’ he said, dreamily dropping a little hard apple on the head of Alan – which could not have injured the softest brain, and scrapping in an apple-tree is dangerous, and I told him so. When peace was restored I went on. ‘I was thinking what if we could build a hut in the woods and spend our spare time in it like the Swiss Family Robinson.’

‘Yes, and have it a secret, of course, so that we can always escape the patient sweetness of the Knox-bird. Rather. I vote we do,’ said Martin.

No one wanted to go fishing after that. There is something about a new house that is far above rubies. Even a proper brick one, and even if you’re not going to live in it yourself. When Aunt Kitty was married I went with her to look at houses – and I should have liked to take them all. But when it comes to a house in the woods that you’re going to build yourself, rubies are simply not in it.

So we talked about it through tea and after tea, and then Clifford said he would be a deputation to Father about it. He was. And when Clifford explained to Father that it would be nice to be able to avoid the insistency of Miss Knox sometimes, Father suddenly became sympathetic and said all right, but where should we get the building materials from? And I said the old chicken-house. And he said all right, but the boards were to be scrubbed because hens are not so particular as they look outside their feathers, and William might do it. William is the under-gardener, and he said it wasn’t his job. But he did do it. And then we went to look for a place in the woods.

Father owns quite a lot of ground with wood and pasture, and he said we might make our house anywhere we liked. He is never one to do things by halves – in which pleasing trait he resembles his eldest son – and he went with me to Hillicks and bought us a hammer and a lot of nails and some screws and a screw-driver and a gimlet and an awl. They were A1, with shiny yellowy handles, and he cut K for Kiddies on the handles and filled it up with ink to show that they were our very own. Then he went to Ireland to fish. Mother said it was not because of Miss Knox. But perhaps Mother does not know Father quite as well as we do. You see, she only married into our family – I am jolly glad she did though – but of course it is not the same as a blood relation, and we ought to understand Father best, being his own noble race.

Even if we had never had our house we should have had a ripping time, for Mother let us go out all day long and take lunch in the donkey and cart. And just the getting away from Miss Knox was alone an absolute beano. [04]

It was much more difficult than you would have thought to find exactly the right place for a house. There was a willow wood close by the river – but Olive thought it would be damp, although your boots only went in about an inch and not right over your ankles as you would have thought to hear the way she went on about it. Clifford suggested a house on posts, but we had to chuck it because the cart couldn’t get through the woods unless we had cut down all the trees – and we did not want to waste time being woodcutters or carrying the chicken-house planks one at a time like silly old beavers.

There was some idea of having the house up a tree – and we did actually begin in an oak, but there was a big branch in the way, and after a whole morning we hadn’t got more than a couple of inches into it, and then the saw stuck – and Martin thought he could get it out and he broke it. So we borrowed another saw and gave up the tree idea. Part of the saw is still imbedded in that branch. Antiquarians in later years will find it and think it so interesting.

And then after three or four days of as first-class exploring as ever I wish to see, we found it. Not just the place for a house – but. . .

It was like this. Our noble steed was unharnessed and tethered in a grassy spot with a few thistles in reach because we know donkeys like them, and though ours always eats grass instead we never know when he may feel that he simply must have a thistle. The girls were arranging the lunch on another grassy vicinity. Alan had got hold of the Swiss Family Robinson, the only book we allowed on exploring expeditions, because when people get into books they can’t be got out for work or play or anything else. So Martin and I just went for an explore on our own. And unlike some other explorers I can think of, we explored right bang into the middle of something.

Deep in the heart of what appeared to be an enchanted wood we came on a bit of paling – all grown over with briers and wild honseysuckle, but still a paling. With grim boots and undaunted hearts the young explorers followed its career, and so came out from behind an elder-bush right on to a cleared space in the wood, where there had been a garden and was still a house. The jolliest house you ever saw. It was quite little – not much bigger than a decent sized summer-house, with a thatched roof and a real chimney and lattice windows, and two stories, an upstairs and a downstairs. Nettles rose high and strong like a magic forest between it and us. And there was the paling, too. But we found a gate in the paling and pressed forward through the nettles, trampling the fallen foes sideways.

They made fine Saracens, and we cut off their heads with our good swords – which were just sticks before – shouting ‘St. George for Merrie England!’ and so made a path over these prostrate infidels right up to the downstairs window, and looked in.

‘Oh, crikey!’ said Martin. So Clifford pulled him away and had a squint himself. Then he observed, ‘You may well say crikey.’

And indeed he might. Anyone might have. There was another window besides the one we were squinting through, there was a fireplace with old ashes and half-burnt sticks in it, and daylight came down the chimney on to the ashes, showing that no evil bird had built its nest there.

There was a broken basket and a coalscuttle with a hole in it, and a fixed wooden seat by the fireplace, something like the settle in our kitchen at home. And there was a broom, very nearly bald, but not quite – and two cupboards and the beginnings of a flight of stairs that we felt sure led up to the first floor.

‘Coo-ee!’ shouted the others, meaning lunch. What a moment to choose for lunch! We took no notice, but looked at each other. Then we listened. The wood was very still.

‘I don’t care,’ said Clifford. And he picked up a stone and broke one of the little diamond panes. (We mended if afterwards with oiled paper, like peasants in history.) It fell with a sweet tinkling sound like fairy bells leading us on. So Clifford put his hand through the hole and turned the catch and opened the window. And we got in. Clifford was first to set foot in that beautiful spot. We got the door open – it stuck a bit with moss and damp, and there were pale earwigs and woodlice, and a centipede that looked very unwell, and I put it out of its misery. There was a broken plate in one of the cupboards and a rusty cake-tin and two clothes pegs in the other. And upstairs there were two little rooms, slopy about the roof, but otherwise fit for princes to sleep in. Not till we had explored every cupboard and sat on the little bench did we condescend to cry ‘Coo-ee!’ and to go back to the others and lunch.

I don’t think I ever enjoyed a meal more. It was sausage-rolls. Not those flimsy things you get in shops, but long solid ones, with home-made sausage inside, and plenty of it – as well as jam tarts and gooseberries and ginger-beer. Besides this there was our secret. They say hunger is the best sauce, but I think a secret is better. Of course we didn’t tell the others for quite a long time, though it is useless to say we did not let them see there was something up. When it came to the jam tarts they could bear it no longer, so we told.

The others were almost as pleased as the first adventurers, and it was very nice for them having us to show them everything and telling them where not to bump their heads and where not to walk on rotten boards.

‘We needn’t build a house now,’ said Olive.

‘Whether we build or not,’ said Alan, ‘we’d better cart the old hen roost along. Else William will begin asking questions about why he had to clean those boards if nobody wanted them.’

We saw this – and we got William to bring the boards to a vicinity spot in the luggage cart and then we carried them ourselves with the donkey’s help to the spot and stacked them against the wall. We got a penny tin of enamel and we painted the house’s name on the door. We called it ‘Mon Abri,’ which a friend of ours calls her cottage at Cromer. It means ‘My Refuge’ – and after it we put F.M.K., to show who it was our refuge from. And we gathered a lot of sticks and made a fire. It didn’t smoke so very much.

‘We must furnish it,’ said Olive; ‘there’s a bit of old carpet in the box-room.’

‘And some chairs,’ said Alan.

‘And a towel-horse,’ said Madeline.

Mother let us have all the things we wanted. She didn’t even say, ‘Hadn’t you better get your house built first?’ which was what we had rather feared. It is a great gift when a chap has a brick [06]  for his mother. And all the things she gave us William carried for us in the luggage-cart to that vicinity spot I told you about.

It is impossible to carry much furniture through a wood without making a path. We did not want a path. Paths lead to discovery – or to secret houses, which is just as bad. We tried to coax the ferns and bushes and things back over the path we had not been able to help making.

In three days our house was furnished. The girls made curtains for the windows out of an old red-and-white quilt Mother gave us. There was a carpet and a table – it had only two legs, but we nailed boards on it and it stood quite nicely, and when there was a tablecloth on it you hardly noticed the flatness of its legs. There were two chairs, one without a back, but that only made it a stool, and more suitable for a cottage in a wood; and cups and saucers and plates we bought ourselves at Killicks. Mauvy blobs on white, very cottagy. So was the blue-and-red table-cover. We bought that ourselves, too. We had a kettle and two teaspoons, and a crockery dog and a geranium in a pot on the window-ledge. It was as beautiful as a Christmas card, and all our own. And then Madeline, who can always be trusted to be a little different from us, said she didn’t think it was nearly as comfortable as the Red House at Yalding! Comfortable! As if the Source of the Nile, or the North Pole, or Robinson Crusoe, or anything really worth having ever came of being comfortable.

However, we forbore to chide, and when she had a newspaper cape and apron and was a Puritan Maiden and we were Royalists in despair, she liked it better.

Of course ‘Mon Abri’ was ripping for all sorts of games. Sieges, or Children of the New Forest, and everything you can think of. There were green wooden shutters outside the windows, that fastened with a hook inside and also with a hook outside. Thus you could make the house almost dark even on the brightest day, but some light always came down the chimney.

It was a ripping place to read aloud in. We got heaps of books down there quite soon. And we kept grub [28]  there. It was a jolly house.

‘I wonder,’ Clifford once pensively said, ‘how such a house could be deserted?’

‘Damp, I expect,’ Olive said so quickly that I knew she was thinking of ghosts.

‘I’d be afraid to sleep here, I know,’ said Madeline, who never notices hints and little things like that.

‘I expect it’s too small really for grownups,’ said Olive in haste, ‘but it’s just the right size for us, isn’t it?’

It was.

Besides our own books we sometimes had Father’s. And it was Father’s Hereward the Wake in the tree-calf binding [51], which really we oughtn’t to have taken without asking, that got left down there one day, and Clifford never thought of it until eight o’clock, and Father was coming home that night. So Clifford, ever a slave to duty, and besides it was his fault it was taken down there at all, and he would have caught it hot if discovered, said he’d go and get it. And Martin said he’d come too. Clifford owns he was not sorry. He is not afraid of the dark any more than you are, but woods are very lonely at night if you are alone in them. And they are dark too.

We got down to the house and Clifford collared the book – he knew just where to lay his hand on it – and he and Martin were just going out when there was a step outside Clifford thought it was the others trying to take a rise out of us, so he said ‘Hist!’ and pulled Martin into the corner cupboard and we held our breaths there, intending to jump out on the others if they were trying to frighten us, but otherwise just to emerge gently and reasonably with biscuits [05]  in our hands.

Judge of our horror and dismay when we heard through the dark the deep bass voice of a perfect stranger.

‘Why, ’ere is a key, and the door’s open,’ it said in hoarse tones, that must have convicted the least observing hearer of his being a criminal. Now Clifford is very observing. Martin is too, of course. So they held each other – and their breaths – in the cupboard till I thought we should have burst.

‘Strike a light, Bill,’ the voice now said.

‘Not till we’ve got the shutters to,’ said another bass voice. Bill, I suppose. ‘’E said there was shutters.’

They blundered out again, and I said to Martin, ‘Fly!’ Because I knew they must be tramps, even if they weren’t the criminals I was sure they were. And, anyhow, you never know.

But before we could get to the door to begin our flying they were back, and they came in and shut the door – and we went on holding our breaths in the cupboard. It made me think of the master-genius of Mr. Paul Neumann, who wrote that thrilling book, A Villain of Parts, and I tell you I did not half like it, because I hadn’t a geological hammer like the chap in the book, or, indeed, any means of self-defence except fists – and we knew by the bass voices of them that we should not be up to their weight.

‘’E said upstairs,’ said one of the men, and then it came to Clifford what they were after. ‘Light up, can’t ye?’

There was no doubt in Clifford’s mind that these criminals had come to the deserted cottage after booty, the fruit of some bandit-like crime committed by one of their gang – most likely the one they meant when they said ‘’E.’

A match was struck; we heard it, but it was as they went upstairs. There was no furniture upstairs, you remember. ‘Hope ’e wasn’t kiddin’ of us,’ the basest one said. We both heard that.

‘Fly!’ I said.

And Martin flew (or is it fled?).

Now it is an odd thing that the criminals, for such there seemed no doubt they must be, came in the dark and couldn’t have known all about the furniture – yet they never knocked against a single thing. Yet Martin, who knew in daylight exactly where every table and chair was, went blundering into the settle with his boots with a noise like the thunders of Jove, and knocked a chair over with a noise words fail the author about. The present writer owns that having caused these rash acts Martin now showed the greatest presence of mind. Instead of considering concealment to be at an end, as too many boys would have done, and cutting off with the noise of boots and a yell, he stole out of the house on tiptoe, and in a perfectly noiseless manner crept round the house and concealed himself under the lean-to shed formed by the boards of the chicken-house, that we had piled up against the side of the house in the wood. Of course I only knew this afterwards.

Clifford did not follow him because the noise of Martin and the furniture fetched the criminals down in a winking.

They struck a match and saw the overturned chair.

‘We best be making a bunk @,’ said the bassest.

‘Sst! Listen,’ said the one who was not so bass.

They listened, and owing to Clifford’s holding his breath almost unbearably in the cupboard and Martin’s masterly and silent retreat, not a sound was heard.

‘’Twasn’t nothing,’ said he whom I will now call Mr. Bass.

‘What about that, then?’ said Mr. Other, as we will now term him. And the match went out as he pointed to a fallen chair.

‘A fox. You may lay to it it was an ole fox,’ said Mr. Bass, ‘come in for shelter, like, and smelt human flesh and went out again.’

‘Good thing ’e didn’t go for us then,’ said Mr. Other. ‘My father’s cousin was bit by a wild cat once, something chronic.’

‘We won’t have any more of these ’ere foxes in ’ere, anyhow.’ said Mr. Bass, and he bolted the door. More, he bolted it at the top. It is a bolt that we never use because it is very rusty, and it sticks so that human aid is despaired of, and you have to use the hammer to it.

Then they went upstairs, and I heard them grunting and moving about.

Now, gentle reader, what would you have done if you had been Martin? And what would you have done if you had been me?

I never was one of those that called Martin a sneak, because he did the only sensible thing and bunked off home to fetch help. Nor was I one of those who considered it cowardly of Clifford to seek escape from his desperate situation by the only means possible. Some people did, but I will not say who, only pausing to add that before you begin to be down on people for things, you should consider what you would do yourself if it had happened to happen to you.

Clifford was perfectly sick of holding his breath in that beastly cupboard. It was very stuffy, besides which it smelt of paraffin and putty and the herring we had meant to toast for tea the Thursday before last and then forgotten all about. Clifford remembered the herring now, enough to make up for all the forgettings of all of us.

He listened. Dead silence reigned above. He lit a match and cautiously lighted a candle end that he knew was on the shelf somewhere. He had to feel among the herring for it, but no matter. Then, very cautiously, like a spy or a gentleman-adventurer, and not in the least like a sneak, he crept across the room and examined the door.

Too true. The top bolt was shot home with all the brutal force of a strong man’s arm. The windows were all shuttered fast, and the shutters only undid from the outside!

‘Shades of heroes,’ he said, or would have said if there had been anyone to say it to – ‘shades of heroes, what on earth am I to do?’

He looked around for means of egressing himself. He had not the least idea what Martin was doing. Martin might be just waiting outside, or he might have gone to fetch help. Even if the latter, help might not come for ages, and Clifford felt that he simply could not go on holding his breath forever, especially near that herring.

He saw quite plainly that these men were desperate characters: they had come to this house to search for something which a third man had said was upstairs.

‘It might be almost anything,’ Clifford told himself, ‘a missing will, or a hoard of jewels – pot of gold, or kegs of smuggled tobacco.’

You may blame Clifford; you may think he ought boldly to have gone upstairs in the dark and asked the Basses what they were doing, and defied the false traitors in their teeth. All I can say is, I wish it had been you there instead of Clifford.

What he did do required all the courage of our boy hero. He very quietly picked up the fallen chair and set it near the door without making the slightest noise. Then he took off his boots. Then he mounted, sock-footed, up on the chair and tried the bolt earnestly. It wasn’t the least good; he had known it wouldn’t be.

Then the great idea came to him. He remembered how the light had come down the chimney, and how he and the others had squinted up and seen quite a large hole at the top where a lamented chimney-pot had fallen off and now lay among the nettles on the estate below. I once got up the hall chimney at home after a cricket ball that happened to go slick down when we were playing catch on the roof. The ball had stuck on a ledge and we got it all right. But that was by daylight with the sympathizing others below and not, as now, with criminals of the deepest die within a yard or two of the bold climber.

But Clifford did it. He went up that chimney with knees and elbows, and he got to the top with no noise at all I am certain. And it was a tight fit, but just not too tight. But when the dauntless climber (braver, believe me, than many a roped guide on an Alp that so much fuss is made about in the papers) got to the part of the chimney where it gets narrow, he found that though his head went through easily enough, his shoulders refused to follow. At least his shoulders did their best, but the masonry stood firm. So he tried to get his head back and it wouldn’t come, twist and turn as he would, and he was afraid to twist and turn too generously for fear his feet would give way and him be left hanging by his head in the chimney, a fate that all, I am sure, would shun. But he didn’t lose his head even when he found he couldn’t get it back. He simply decided that he must follow it at all costs. So he got his foot on a brick and shoved for all he was worth. He felt something giving, and shoved harder, and next moment his shoulders shot up out of the chimney. But an awful weight on them made him put his hand up as soon as he could get it clear. And he found that the weight was bricks. The top course had come away with his shoving, and there he was with a solid collar of bricks round his neck and a noise of falling mortar rustling down the thatch and bumping on the planks below with a row that would have betrayed his presence even to the deafest. Unless of course, stone. And under the thatch he heard movement and voices.

‘They shan’t get my legs, anyway,’ he said, and drew them up and got into the cool open air, which was very dark and quiet in the wood and the night.

Clifford now cautiously endeavoured, by every means in his power, to remove his collar. This is very difficult when the collar is of brick. Also it hurts. And anyhow his efforts were quite vain. He sat astride of the roof with the ends of the thatch pricking his stockinged feet and that fatal brick collar holding his young throat in its heavy embrace, and wondered what would happen next. He could still hear from under the thatch the stealthy murmurings and movings of the two desperate characters from which he was seeking to escape. All too well he knew that such characters stick at nothing.

He turned on the roof ridge – as well as he could for the weight of the collar – and wondered whether it would break his neck if he slid down that part of the roof which reaches nearly to the ground. He could not decide the question, and it was as he sat irresolute that he heard the terrible sound of the key turning in the door. And he thought he had left the key outside when he went in! A slight rustling sound below and next moment a dark head appeared above the bottom line of the thatch.

Clifford is glad that he was not able to loosen his brick collar. He tried to fervently, and if success had crowned his efforts he would certainly have let it slide down the roof on to the approaching head and perhaps been a brothericide. For next moment the head said ‘Hullo!’ in a mysterious whisper and began climbing up the thatch. And it was Martin. The collar remained firm.

Clifford was never so glad to see anyone before, though if it had been Martin with bricks round his neck I do not suppose Clifford would have choked with laughter and nearly fallen off the roof on account of it, even if the moon did choose that moment for coming out and illuminating the brick collar with Dianistic splendour.

‘Shut up, you duffer!’ whispered Clifford with his stiff neck. ‘Have you fetched anyone?’

‘I met William – I told him – he’s gone to fetch the police. They’ll be here in a sec.’

‘Did you come back alone?’

‘Yes,’ whispered Martin. ‘I thought if I could get you out we could lock them in, and when I heard all that row and saw you on the roof I just turned the key. And we’ve got ’em, old chap, we’ve got ’em!’ Clifford could not help thinking that it was jolly decent of Martin to come back like that all on his own. Many boys would not have. And as Clifford has an open, generous nature he told Martin what he thought of him. And there are boys who would not have done that either. And through the woods in the dark, too. The more Clifford thought of it afterwards the more he thought of it. That looks like nonsense, doesn’t it? But it’s all right really if you think a bit.

So there we were hanging on to that roof beneath which the baffling criminals surged.

‘Remember the first-floor windows have all got bars,’ Martin said, and I am almost sure he winked, though you can’t be quite so certain by moonlight.

‘Rather,’ Clifford responded.

And then there were voices and lanterns, and the rescue party arrived. There were William and Bilson, who is our coachman, and the Police, whose private name is Jackson. The Police had got his truncheon, and William had got an old gun that hadn’t been let off for twenty years – for he told me afterwards – and Bilson had got Father’s revolver out of his shaving-stand drawer – and behind them came the person who had given him the revolver, and this person was a woman. And the woman was Miss Knox.

‘Jolly plucky of her too, I call it,’ Martin murmured, and then Clifford called out with presence of mind:

‘Don’t shoot – it’s us up here, Clifford and Martin.’

So they didn’t shoot, but halted on the other side of the house where there are no windows.

‘The criminals are safe inside,’ said Clifford, calm on the roof ridge as Lord Nelson on the soon-to-be-bloodstained deck of the Victory. ‘All shutters and doors are fastened outside. I wish someone would come up here and get these bricks off my neck.’

‘Terrible!’ cried the voice of Miss Knox, ‘they’ve tied bricks round the dear child’s neck. Thank Heaven, we’re in time. In another moment they might have drowned the darling in a pond like they do with puppies.’

Have you ever been called a dear child and a darling by a person you don’t like? And in public? The present author has been. He knows.

‘Assist the poor dear,’ cried Miss Knox, who would come out with them, William told me afterwards. ‘Nothin’ short of laying her out would ’a stopped her,’ he said. But her words were needless, as so often happens to be.

Already William was up at the thatch and Jackson after him. And when they saw the brick collar round Clifford’s neck they laughed! With criminals eminent below, and Clifford having gone through what he had they could laugh! Such, alas, is poor human nature. But they got the bricks off all right, and then we all got down – on the windowless side, and then Bilson said: ‘Now for these ’ere criminals. Surrender, or I fire!’ The revolver was not loaded, some people think, but strict truth is wasted on the truly vicious.

‘Criminal yourself,’ was the unexpected reply from inside the house; ‘’ere, you let us out and ha’ done with it.’

‘Not much we don’t,’ William answered, keeping well against the wall; and Miss Knox screamed, ‘Oh, don’t let them out! For my sake, don’t let them out!’

‘What are you doing here?’ the Police said, and the astonishing answer was:

‘I’ve ’ad my fill of Charry Table gents, to last me all my time, so I ’as. Let us out, guvner.’

‘There’s a large body of persons here,’ said Bilson, ‘and all highly armed’ – I don’t know how he could. ‘Do you surrender?’

‘’Course we do, if you will ’ave it. Hannythink you like. Let us out o’ this.’

‘How did you get into it?’ said the thin voice of Miss Knox.

‘You breast make a clean best of it,’ said William muddlingly.

‘There ain’t nothing to breast about, you silly cuckoo,’ said the bass voice from inside of our house. ‘Your parson, we asked him fourpence for a doss – and you can lag us for begging, so you can, and do it and be blessed to you. And ’e give us this ’ere key – an’ ’e says, “You’ll find two rugs under the loose board number four from the window in the front room upstairs,” ’e says – “and welcome,” says ’e. “Good-night, brothers, and bring back the key in the morning,” ’e says; “I’ve lent that key a many times, and it allus comes ’ome to roost as regular as the milk in the morning,” ’e says. And now, look at you,’ said the bass voice, getting angrier. ‘First, foxes in the furniture, and then ghostes round the walls with howls in the chimbley to follow, toppin’ up with ostriches roostin’ on the roof and spittin’ out the stones what they eats all down the thatch. And then you.’

‘Ostriches don’t. . .’ Miss Knox began, even at that moment ready to contradict.

‘If what you’re saying’s correct, you come along of us to the parson – and you best come quiet,’ said the Police.

‘Quiet? I should like to know who wouldn’t be after the beano we’ve ’ad,’ the bass voice said. ‘It’ll be a treat to be quiet, that’s what. The casual or the stone jug for me after this, is what I say.’

Then they unlocked the door, and two men came out. They were quite small, not much bigger than Martin. In fact, if you had measured Clifford against the taller of them I know which I think would have made the best show. Just poor little tramps they were, for all the bassness of their voices, and everything they said was true. How different from our coachman, Bilson, who has such a good character, ‘man and boy.’

It turned out that our cottage wasn’t ours at all. It wasn’t even on Father’s land. It was in the strip of land that goes with the Rectory – the Parson’s Shave, they call it. And the parson being a good old sort, used to let tramps sleep there. He kept two blankets hidden under a board, and none of the tramps, who seem to have been good sorts too, ever stole either of the blankets. He wanted the two Basses to go back and sleep there that night, but they said they’d jolly well had enough and wouldn’t.

The Rector, who is what I said, was most awfully decent about it when we explained, and said we might use the downstairs part for our very own in the daytime, if we cleared out before six and didn’t go there before ten. He came to tea with us, and said:

‘Your domestic appointments are magnificent,’ and drank four cups, besides cakes and biscuits.

It was Miss Knox who was the tragedy: the unfortunate adventure, and Martin going and fetching everyone – though I am too fair to blame him for it – simply left us a prey to that kind but detestable lady. After that she used to come every day almost, and bring her work and sit in the porch of the cottage and call out every now and then, ‘I hear you. That’s right, dears, enjoy yourselves!’ And she used to bring us chocolate – which was simply awful for us – feeling as we did.

The rest of the holidays turned into a sort of hide-and-seek, trying not to be found at the cottage when she came. But she was much cleverer at the game than we were. I wish to be fair to her, and I wish she had not given us the chocolate. But if I am to speak the truth, and not be like our coachman with the character, all I can say is that Miss Knox is a tragedy. I wonder if it is the same wherever she goes? Olive says it is dreadful to be a tragedy, we ought to be sorry for her; but the rest of us think we have enough to do being sorry for all the other people who haven’t done anything to deserve it, and have got to be the victims of a tragedy like her.

CHAPTER NINE.

The Dwellers

It was when the parson came to tea with us in our house in the wood, which was really his house, that we first heard all about different kinds of dwellers. Martin told him that we had thought of building our house in a tree, but had given it up because of the broken and embedded saw. So then he told us about tree-dwellers and lake-dwellers and cave-dwellers and villa-dwellers – which are the only kind we know – and all of it was most interesting, though, I believe, perfectly true. They have found the bones of cave-dwellers mixed with bears and mammoths, he said, and they used flint weapons, and drew pictures in dark caves, and it is considered mysterious how they could see to do it – because matches and candles had not yet been thought of.

And the lake-dwellers did not live in the lake, like the cave-dwellers did in the caves, but in houses built on stilts that had their feet in the water – like Clifford had wanted to build in the willow wood that was so damp – and the tree-dwellers just lived in trees, as naturally they would. The parson said he did not think there were any tree-dwellers alive now except our poor relations. He meant the monkeys. But he said people still lived in stilted houses, and also in caves. If you are going to understand this story at all, you will have to attend to what I am now saying, even if I do seem instructive. I give you my word I will not go on being – not a single moment more than is necessary. I do not like it myself.

These different kind of dwellers I have been telling you about were ferocious savages, who sometimes ate their enemies. They were as fierce as they could possibly be, and wore hardly any clothes – only wild beast-skins. They were all like this, except the villa-dwellers, who are quite different and just like other people. That is all the instructive part. We now come to the narrative. Martin and Carlie were having measles and were in bed at the time, and so were wholly out of it. I mean out of the adventure I am now about to relate.

Their measled condition was half the cause of everything that happened. Measles is an infected disease, which means that if you are anywhere about where it is you catch it. It is a painful and snivelling disorder. I wonder Madeline did not catch it. She is always catching hay-fever, and I should have thought one sniffing disease was as easy to catch as another. But Madeline thought otherwise. She often thinks otherwise.

So when the fell plague had become known, and the others were put to bed, Olive and Alan and Madeline and the present author were sent off at once to stay with an uncle at Chislehurst, a spot we had never before visited. He was a newish uncle, having but recently retired from the Army (Artillery), in which and in India he had spent most of his manhood’s prime. Uncles who have been in the Army are more difficult to please than the plain kind of uncle. Accustomed as they are to unquestioning obedience of their regiments, they jump down your throat if you do the least thing. And there are not many books in their houses that you care about reading. At least, this was the case with the uncle on whose hospitable shore we were cast up by the measles. Noise upsets this kind of uncle more than you would think when you remember how noisy drums are, and soldiers’ boots, to say nothing of trumpets and guns, and the clash of battle.

When we had been at his house about forty-eight hours we were as near bursting as I ever wish to be. We seemed to have been holding our breaths ever since we came: and there was no getting away from the uncle. He pounced on you in his stiff military way, in spots you would have thought far out of his beat. But the Artillery motto is Ubique, which means all over the shop, and I suppose he had to practise being it. It was really wonderful how successful he was at it.

It was on the second morning after breakfast, which was porridge, eggs and bacon, cold tongue, marmalade and toast, and only speak when you are spoken to, we met together in cautious despair in a summerhouse – very tidy and shiny with green paint, at the bottom of the garden – and Alan said:

‘Measles lasts three weeks.’

‘More than we shall, if this goes on,’ said Clifford.

Madeline said: ‘I shouldn’t mind it so much if everything was different.’

And Olive said: ‘Well, everything is different from home. But it’s no use repining.’

‘No,’ said Clifford, ‘we’ve jolly well got to stick it.’

‘Couldn’t we tame him?’ Madeline suggested, as if retired Colonels were mice.

‘It isn’t taming he wants, my child,’ said Clifford, ‘he wants warming. It is iced water that flows in his veins – not blood at all.’

‘We could easily do something to wake him up,’ said Alan cheerfully.

‘Let sleeping uncles lie,’ said Clifford. ‘What we’ve got to do is to devise a plan to alleviate our desperate existence. Can’t anyone think of anything?’

Curiously enough no one could. Only at last Madeline said:

‘We might take him into a wood and leave him there.’

This was what we had done to her, though very sorry for it afterwards, as you know, and she needn’t have mentioned it again when all had long been forgotten and forgiven. But Madeline is like that.

‘I think some noble task would help us most,’ said Olive, hurriedly, taking no notice of Madeline. ‘I shall buy some blue wool and knit him some bed-socks. In two shades.’

‘I expect he’d like a nightcap better,’ said Madeline. ‘A knitted helmet, you know, like they have in the Army. And even some mittens. If he hasn’t any blood, like Clifford said, only iced water, he must always be shivering with cold. And I expect that’s what makes him so difficult to get on with. I always feel cross in the cold weather.’

Alan said not to be idiots, or we should never get anything decided, and Madeline said it wasn’t she who was the idiot, and it was some time before all hearts were pacified and at peace again.

‘My only comfort,’ said Clifford, ‘is that my collars won’t hold out. [14]  Three a day isn’t what they’ve been used to.’

‘Well, you won’t be allowed to go home for more,’ said Alan. ‘They’ll just send them along. Mine are pretty well over, too.’ It is rare indeed for an uncle to notice what you have got on. Aunts are more observative.

‘I suppose it’s being tidy himself,’ said Olive. He was tidy, more so than I have ever seen anyone in human shape. No matter where he went he never got dusty. The muddiest day had no power over his boots – he never got blacks on his nose, even in trains. There are few uncles like him in this fair and untidy world. This was why he was always sending Clifford to put on a clean collar, little knowing how near The End of them was.

‘But what can we do?’ Alan impatiently asked.

‘Grin and bear it,’ said Clifford.

‘I will bear it,’ said Madeline, who always thinks what you say is exactly the same thing as you mean; ‘but grinning is vulgar, and it wasn’t my fault I upset my coffee at breakfast. I expected it to be tea, and it upset me when I found it wasn’t.’

Nothing whatever came of this talk. I only tell it you to show you what it was like staying with that uncle.

Up to now the uncle had not punished us – and we had really not done anything deserving such conduct, either. But he had jawed, and that was enough to show us what it would be like when he did begin to punish. And we knew it would be improbable for us to go on doing nothing to excite his just vengeance. We feared the worst, and the worst happened, as it so often does, quite unexpectedly.

Like Minerva out of the head of Jupiter, the worst sprang full armed out of a tea and address to Serious Sergeants. The tea was in the garden with lots of buns and cakes, and the address was not quite fair really, because when once our uncle had got the Serious Sergeants there he loosed a whole pack of addressers on them – all old gentlemen, very long winded and eloquent, and they jawed quite without pause or tiredness. They were good stayers. One was a bishop.

We fled the scene as soon as the buns were over. The time seemed ripe for a game of silent ‘I Spy,’ which we had long thought would be the bow-what-do-you-call-it of excitement. We never thought we should get to do it. But now everyone was out in the grounds, even the servants, being addressed like mad – and the large quiet house with two staircases lay waiting our manœuvres. It is rather a fine game really. Clifford invented it. Instead of shouting ‘I spy!’ you exchange meaning glances with the found, and there is always a paralysed period of glare before you start running or he starts catching you. The others have to take their chance. You run as quietly as you can, but somehow your movements are usually heard by the others.

Before beginning the game Clifford thought he would do a kind act for the tidy uncle. There was a bit of string with a knot sticking out from behind a piece of furniture, and Clifford cut it with his new knife and threw it away. Then with a happy something-attempted-something-done sort of feeling he started on ‘I Spy.’

It was all right till Madeline and Olive were chasing Alan and me and we came down the front stairs, and they came down the back to head us off, and we met at the hat-stand in the hall. We were all going a pretty good lick, and it was like four locomotives meeting at a railway accident. Or, rather five, for the hat-stand took a sudden and spirited part in the game. It waved itself a little in the air, and then down it came, burying us under an avalanche of coats, while high hats thundered around us on the marble floor, like discharges of artillery. There were losses on both sides. The hat-stand lost several pegs, Madeline’s head was bumped, Olive hurt her elbow, and I know I felt the place on my back for weeks. We freed ourselves from the hurtling hat-stand – it turned out afterwards it had always been of a wavering disposition and had to be controlled by string, which was what I had cut – and how was I to know? The uncle was simply frightful to the butler about it afterwards, said it was a living lie, and he ought to have had lead nailed under it if it wouldn’t stand upright by itself.

And when we had got free, and gazed around on the wreckish results the stoutest of us quailed. There was a Chinese jar that a missionary had looted from China and given to the uncle – it must have been a noble smash if only we could have seen it. And a brass tray dented – three umbrellas smashed right through their ribs, looking like broken-winged birds. But the high hats! The others did not seem to know, but Clifford knew, for he is nearly a man. They were bent, and rubbed up, and scratched. The hat-stand had fallen on one, and Olive had sat on another. All poetical dreamers who ever imagine anything must have imagined sitting down hard on a high hat as one of the heights of worldly bliss – but to do it like this without knowing about it at the time is not at all the same thing; it is a wasted joy besides being a devastating accident that no being awfully sorry for can wipe out. And, of course, when we picked up the most firmly sat-on hat we saw the loops of cord and knew it was the bishop’s. It would be. Life is like that.

We looked at each other and at the ruins of that once happy hat and hall and hat-stand. And we heard the Serious Sergeants clapping one of the addressers. We never knew which.

‘Oh,’ said Madeline, ‘I can’t bear it. Let’s hide till he’s got over it a little.’

‘We ought to face the music,’ said Clifford, who wishes to be a conscientious hero.

‘We needn’t face it yet,’ said Alan. ‘Wait till the Serious Sergeants have gone.’

‘Let’s fly,’ said Olive. ‘We can come back and face it better when our hearts aren’t going it like this, and when we’ve had time to find out exactly where we’re hurt, and how much.’

‘We’ll leave a letter, then,’ said Clifford, and with fingers that trembled not from fear, but because the hat-stand had trampled on them with its mahogany foot, he wrote on a leaf of his pocket-book:

‘We are guilty, and we will come back and suffer for it when the Serious Sergeants are over.’

We signed our names, put the paper amid the ruins of the bishop’s hat, and stealthily fled. Clifford had the sense to conduct the flight by a roundabout route, that did not pass the addressed lawn, and that did happen to go through the pantry. Here the instincts of a born general taught him to provision his men for the march. We took bread and jam tarts, cake, and the departed remains of what was once a large fowl. Also cold sausages, and some stoned raisins we found in a basin. Ready for a pudding, I suppose.

Clifford, at the risk of capture, honestly went back and wrote on the paper: ‘We have taken some grub: necessity nose no law.’ So it was not stealing.

We fled to the fence that is the end of the uncle’s domain. But this did not seem far enough. So we climbed the fence. I don’t know how we got Madeline over, but we did, and the tear in her frock has been mended since and does not show so very much.

‘Only a fence, a simple oak fence.’ Like they say in books about faded flowers. But what a difference! The uncle’s garden was tidy and gravelly – you couldn’t drop a bit of silver paper off butterscotch or spit out a cherry-stone without its showing. But here all was wildness and adventure. The trees were much taller, the undergrowth was thick and close like in tropical forests, there were ferns and brambles and dried branches and dead leaves, thick, and deep and rustling; and here and there patches of fine green turf, and soft, cushiony, green moss.

‘No human eye,’ said Clifford, throwing himself down on the green cushioniness, ‘can mark our proceedings.’

‘It is a jolly place,’ said Alan, and he sat down too, and so did Olive. But not Madeline. Oh no. She said it was sure to be damp, and she thought the nice dry leaves would be much better for us. So she went prowling about looking for an extra-dry place.

Clifford was lying on his injured back looking up into the trees, where it is so light and green, and you would like to nail a house up there and live like the Swiss Family Robinson.

He had just cut off six-foot lengths of nine by two-and-a-half dream-boards with an imaginary saw, to begin making the house, when howls met his ear.

Madeline, a prey as usual to conflicting destiny, was rustling and struggling among the leaves and saying: ‘Ow! Ow!’ with despairing violence. She appeared to be on her knees.

‘’Ware snakes,’ said Clifford with calm decision, and we all went – really quite quickly – towards Madeline.

We were nearly there – only the brambles were strong and twisty, because we went the nearest way, and interpeded our advance – when Madeline began to disappear – I saw her head going lower and lower, and if I had not known geography I should have said a boa constrictor had entwined itself about her reluctant form and was dragging her to its fell lair. But of course in Chislehurst this would be far from an everyday occurrence. On the other hand, if not a boa constrictor, what was it?

This was the question we all asked.

‘What is it, Mad?’ we asked in variating tones. ‘What is it?’

We now saw Madeline, buried in the leaves up to her elbows, which she was leaning on. ‘What is it?’ we kept on saying. And she answered in the following remarkable remark:

‘I have lost my legs,’ was what she said. Again the serpent writhed through the fragile brain of Clifford, but was rejected as not likely in the garden of England, which, I believe, Kent is called.

‘Lost your legs?’ said Olive. ‘You can’t have.’

‘Hold on to me,’ said Madeline in accents of great terrifiedness; ‘if you don’t I shall lose all the rest of myself.’

‘Why,’ said Clifford, declining the serpent for good and all, ‘you must have fallen into a hole.’ And he caught her by one arm, signing to Alan to catch the other. But Alan was not quick enough. Already the hem of Madeline’s dress was standing up round her in a frill. It looked like the petals of a black rose, which is a silly romantic idea, and it was Olive who thought of it afterwards.

And now, before Alan had time to obey the ready Clifford and catch her other arm, Madeline’s arms went up over her head and she sank out of sight.

I need not assure the reader that Clifford held on as long as he could, but all was vain. You can’t hold a great girl like that up with one hand. As it was, Clifford’s arm was very near disconnected at the socket.

‘Ow!’ said Madeline just before her mouth went under the dead leaves. The last that was seen of her was the ends of her hair. Then they vanished with a quiet rustling of the leaves.

And there we were in the wood – just three of us – who had been four, and Madeline had disappeared into the ground.

We listened in vain for the sickening thud that always happens in newspapers when people fall from any height. There was none, and the leaves seemed to have closed over her disappearance like waves. Only some of the damp leaves turned up from underneath marked the fatal spot.

We hastened to clear away the leaves in armfuls. They were very thick indeed. The voice of Madeline suddenly yelling just underneath us made us stop for a minute, and then go on harder than ever, replying to the buried one by whispered yells, so as not to be heard by the Serious Sergeants, of ‘All right,’ ‘You hold on,’ and ‘We’re coming.’

We had lifted away quite a lot of leaves – you see, they kept tumbling in from the sides and choking up the hollow as fast as we made it – before we found the hole in the ground through which our cousin had happened to sift.

It was just about big enough for a man to get through, not more.

‘Are you hurt? Where are you? Can’t you get out?’ we now said all at once.

And Madeline replied from the depths of the earth: ‘I’m here. No, of course I can’t. It’s all soft leaves. I’m not hurt. I wish you’d come down and help me.’

Clifford’s ambition is, of course, to be the bravest brave that was ever tolled for, but he owns that he said:

‘Is it far? Far down, I mean.’

‘Oh, no,’ said Madeline; ‘you can drop quite easily.’

So then he put his boots into the hole and followed them. No hero can do more.

He felt about with his feet and found stones sticking out of the side of the hole that he might have climbed down by, but he thought it safest to drop from the top in case dropping became needful further down, at some spot where he couldn’t get a good grip and swing clear.

You would not believe how little he liked to do that drop into the unknown, and perhaps on to Madeline, though he had already shouted ‘Stand from under!’ before inserting his boots.

Well, no matter what his feelings, he did drop – and it was a much longer drop than he expected, though I don’t suppose Madeline meant to deceive. He fell quite soft, into a heap of dry leaves and crisp twigs. And when he had recovered from all fours, which is what he landed on, owing to the springiness of the leaves, he stood up and felt for solid ground and found it.

Then he said, ‘Where are you?’ and Madeline said, ‘Here, of course,’ and he struck a match and lit a bit of candle. All us boys always carry matches and candles. You never know. And how true that was in this case!

The unintending explorers found themselves not, of course, in a serpent’s lair, nor even, which Clifford had also thought of, a bear-pit long disused since the days in History when they used to bait them. No! it was better than that by long chalks. It was, quite really and truly and with no nonsense about it, a cave. It arched up over our heads about as high as a ceiling, and quite as white. The floor, except where the leaves had fallen through the hole, and heaped up under it, for countless ages, was covered with smooth sand. And it was large – not just a hole-and-corner sort of cave, but a big cavern that stretched out behind us and before us, like a winding underground tunnel.

‘I want to get out,’ said Madeline.

‘I daresay you do,’ said Clifford brightly, and he looked up at the roof of the cave where the hole was that we had come down by. Of course it was far beyond our reach.

‘Hi!’ was now heard to be being shouted by Olive and Alan above, ‘what is it?’

‘It’s a cave,’ said Clifford, ‘a jolly big one.’

‘I say – I’m on,’ remarked Alan, and as the hole shut up I knew he had put his boots into it.

‘You can’t get out again,’ I shouted – but too late. His boots and his body had shut off our voices from his ears. Next moment he stood beside us – on all fours.

‘Stay where you are,’ Clifford yelled up to Olive. ‘Look here – you mustn’t come down. I’m sorry for you – you’ll have to break it to Uncle, and make him send ropes and rescues. I should wait till the Serious Sergeants are out of the way. We shall be all right here.’

She said it was perfectly beastly of us, shoving it on to her, but Clifford explained patiently how we couldn’t help it. We got her to roll most of the grub up in her pinafore and drop it down the hole, in case of the Serious Sergeants being a long time going.

‘And now,’ said Clifford, ‘I vote we explore a bit.’ We explored. It was like the Hampton Court Maze, only instead of being hot sun and grit under your feet it was quite cool, and soft sand and very dark. And it went on and on. It was rather like the crypt of Rochester Cathedral, only the pillars were too big and not carved at all. There were rough arches in the walls here and there, and flat stones inside, something like the tombs in a church, only much rougher. And we went on and on and on and it was most interesting – even Madeline said so. We ate our grub in one of the tomblike arches – and there was a stream running along through the sand in one place, that we drank out of like dogs.

And then we suddenly remembered that it was time to get back to the hole we had tumbled in by, so as to be ready to be hauled up by ropes and royally rowed, which we knew must be, however undeserved. You will hardly believe that Clifford had quite forgotten the injurious hat-stand, and the others said afterwards that they had too.

‘We came round by that pillar,’ said Madeline.

‘It is the first to the left,’ Alan said.

And perhaps it was. Only what happened is exactly what you are expecting, so why waste pages and pages in working you up to it, as if I was a grown-up author? The plainest words are the best, as some great author beautifully observes. And no decorated words can express our horrible state better than these plain ones: We were lost in those caves, and we could not find the hole we had come in by.

The author begs you to stop and make despairing reflections, which you can do quite as well as us, especially when you learn that we had not thought we should be lost, and so had spent the candles with the freedom of a royal ransom.

There was about two inches of candle left; it was in two pieces.

When we had owned that we were lost, and I am sorry to say blamed each other, which I will draw a veil and dots over, Clifford assumed command.

‘Out with the candle,’ he said, and suiting the action to the word he blew.

The darkness was like black velvet.

Madeline screamed.

‘Don’t scream,’ said Clifford patiently; ‘it won’t do any good and it makes your throat sore if you go on. Yes – certainly. Alan and I will sit on each side of you and hold your hands. There’s nothing to be afraid of. When they find we aren’t at the opening they’ll send down the butler or one of the footmen to hunt for us with stable lanterns.’

Clifford said this, but he did not altogether feel it.

We sat down in the sand and were silent.

‘We’d better yell every now and then,’ said Alan presently. I do really think Alan and Clifford behaved rather well. Madeline, also, might have been worse. She pinched our hands like mad, and burbled, but she did not yell. And the darkness went on being like black velvet.

We said poetry, and tried to tell each other tales, but it is difficult. If we had had more candle, of course, we wouldn’t have given up like that, but it is easier to sit in the velvet dark if you know you can light it up whenever you choose, than to have no candle-ends left for emergencies.

We explained this to Madeline so often that I think in the end she began to understand that there might be something in it.

And after a very long dark time, when our ears had got quite stiff inside with listening to hear if anyone was shouting to us from the hole, Alan suddenly said: ‘I see a light: sunlight, I think; let’s go to it – perhaps it’s another way out.’ And then, like a true duffer, he struck a match. Clifford blew it out again at once, but of course we couldn’t see anything for ever so long afterwards.

But at last, by Alan explaining very carefully what he meant, that it was a streak of yellow light, we crawled towards it, and it got brighter and brighter like a star would if it was shaped like a line instead of a point (Euclid), and then Clifford, leading as usual, saw many stars because he bumped his head. It was against the wall of the cave we found, when we lighted a match, and the light proved, when darkness again appeared, to come from under the wall. So then we all knelt down and began to scratch away the sand with our hands, digging exactly as you have seen your fox terrier do when he is gardening in the flower-beds of your kind parents. And we dug and scratched, and the sand was very loose – and the light got larger. And the light was redder than we expected, and we thought what hours we must have been there, and that it was sunset.

And at last the hole looked big enough to crawl through. So we tried – but of course it wasn’t. So dog-digging was resumed. And at last it was big enough, and Clifford crawled through flat on his front like a serpent is doomed to go. He had to shut his eyes because of the sand, and when he felt he was through the hole he opened them again, and the light was gone, and all was black velvet once more. It was a baffling moment, and if Clifford’s voice was choky as he said, ‘Hold on,’ and struck a match, I, for one, do not blame him. He lit his candle, and looked – and it was just another cave that the young explorers had so carefully dog-dug their way into.

‘Come on,’ said Clifford; ‘it’s just another cave, but there must be someone here because of the light.’ So they came on, and we began to walk with one candle, hoping to find the human aid which is so often despaired of. But we couldn’t find any. And the candle was nearly done, when we heard a confused sound of voices very loud and echoing. They were quite close – just a turning or two off, I should say, and we could hear all their words very distinctly. But we could not understand them. And almost at the same moment I stumbled over something, and it was a pick-axe – very old and worn. And then the voices grew louder and there was a peal of fiend-like laughter.

Clifford caught Madeline’s arm. ‘Back!’ he cried, ‘back to the dog-hole. They aren’t human aid: they’re cave-dwellers!’

We all backed for all we were worth, but we couldn’t find the dog-hole – of course. But there was an arch, and the roof or the sides or something had fallen in and made a mound that nearly reached the roof. We climbed up on this and lay flat on the top of the mound under the roof. There was just room.

I will not deceive the reader. Our hearts were not strangers to alarm. We knew all about cave-dwellers, you remember, and how fierce they were, and what, very likely, they ate – and about their axes (pick ones as well, no doubt). In fact I scorn to deny it – we were jolly frightened. Villa-dwellers we knew still existed, also lake-dwellers. Why not cave-dwellers who had gone on unsuspected by the busy world – like in Mr. Wells’s Time Machine – lurking underground? I did wish then that I hadn’t read the Time Machine.

We lay there flat and frightened, and we heard the voices go by and light shone on the stone roof just above our faces. And again we heard the voices and could not understand a single word they said.

They did not now sound fierce. The present writer thought their tones were more as if they were having one of their primeval jollifications than as if they were up to any of their dark cave-dwelling dodges. But he felt it would not do to trust to their feeling jolly at the moment. For, of course, they would never let anyone out who could tell the people outside about how the long-lost cave-dwellers still subsisted in their primitive way, unknown to the police, and most likely living by secret burglary when people were asleep in their beds.

You cannot look down when you are lying on your back on the top of a mound. But we heard the voices go by, and lights gleamed on the chalk roof that our faces were quite close to. Some of the dust had got into Clifford’s throat, and he wanted to cough more than he ever has in his life, and he was holding his breath and determining to choke rather than betray his presence in that silly way, when suddenly The Worst – once more – occurred. There was a rattling, rustling sound, a stifled cry, a scrabbling and a scratching, and one of us rolled from the top of the mound down its earthy sides. Need you ask which one? It was Madeline. And Clifford hastily rolled over on his front in time to see her land bang in the middle of the astonished cave-dwellers. He only saw very dimly, because her rolling had made clouds of dust. He scrambled down after her.

I do not say it was a hero’s deed. I only say it was better to do that and feel comfortable in your inside, than to wait where you were and be discovered later feeling like a skunk. And the end would be the same anyhow. As he scrambled he shouted, ‘All right, Mad, I’m coming!’

This was really all he did – but when it came to facing the uncle, the way Madeline told about it made the uncle a different being. He was most frightfully jolly afterwards, and said things about heroes, and the hat-stand was forgiven and forgotten.

All this time Madeline and our young hero were in the cave surrounded by the crowd of dread cave-dwellers. It was an awful moment, you will think? You are wrong. For, strange to say, they turned out not to be cave-dwellers at all, but a party of Italian tourists being shown over the caves by a proper English guide with a lantern. And the caves are just show-caves though very old and wonderful, and everyone knew they were there except us! It was a silly ending to the finest adventure we ever had.

Only there was some glory in it – because nobody knew of the hole we had fallen in by, nor yet the hole we had scraped under the wall. The part we fell into was unknown to man, and the guide, who proved most jolly, said he should call that part ‘the Clifford Caves.’ What we fell down was a dene-hole. [55]  If you go to the Chislehurst caves you’ll see it. But it is better to go in by the front way.

CHAPTER TEN.

The Criminals

or  The Stolen Elephant

To look at us no one, except of unsound mind, would ever say that we looked as if we had descended to the lowest abysses of crime. Yet such, I am sorry to own, is the fact. We were sorry when we were told that it was wrong, but at the time, as is so often the case, it did not seem so. And I shall always feel sorry for criminals who do our kind of crime, because now I know the dangers and difficulties of doing it, and what you have to put up with both during and afterwards; and I also know that we should never have done it if other people had not behaved to us in a way no free-born Englishman could be expected to bear, especially when one of them had a passionate Southern nature. And we do not know the sad pasts of criminals, or what drove them to it, or perhaps we should be kinder to them than we are, and not put them in prison so much, but just teach them better. We were quite ready to learn better the moment we were taught, and we were really sorry for doing what we had, especially as Father and Mother did not like it. All the same it was a lark.

It happened like this. At the beginning of the holidays we discovered, with sinking hearts, that Mother had asked Miss Knox to stay over Christmas. This comes of Mother’s having such a kind heart. She is always asking people she doesn’t want, just because they have nowhere else to go. Father calls them the Undesirables, and never takes any notice of them at all except to say, ‘Ha, good morning, Miss Knox. Quite well? That’s right!’ in a very jolly and kind way, and then takes no more notice of them till it is time to say, ‘Goodnight, Miss Knox. Sleep well!’ in a manner as kind and jolly as the other.

We, however, are not allowed to behave like this. We have to be polite to Undesirables just the same as if they were anybody else.

And Miss Knox was awful, as usual. You always felt she was always trying to get something out of Mother, and she was full of gentle, patient cheerfulness, and that is very wearing, as I daresay you have noticed. And she would call people ‘Dear Mrs. —whatever-their-name-was,’ and say ‘Have we not?’ and ‘Do we not?’ instead of ‘Haven’t we?’ and ‘Don’t we?’ like other people. And I do not like her voice, or the shape of her face, or the way she does her hair, or the smell of her handkerchief, or the way she drinks, or eats bread-and-butter. Mother says this is called prejudice and is very wrong. I am sorry I have this dreadful fault, but I would rather have it than be like Miss Knox all the same. And so would the others.

I do not wish to be unjust, so I will own that Miss Knox did a lot for the Bazaar. Father said that Miss Knox spread Bazaars like a disease wherever she went, but Mother said, ‘Hush!’ But the Bazaar had been Miss Knox’s idea all the same when she was down in the summer, and we had the pig-fight. Father said she liked Bazaars because then people had to take notice of her, and she could talk to people she wasn’t introduced to. But Mother said ‘Hush!’ again, and got up and shut the door that we were sitting in the room at the other side of.

I do not like Bazaars. I never can see why people can’t give their money to decayed curates, or lost dogs, or whatever it is, without getting something Miss Knox has made in exchange. But this is one of the many subjects where the author’s powerful mind causes him to think thoughts unshared by others. And perhaps I had better get on with the story.

We made things for the Bazaar, of course. The girls made pin-cushions and kettle-holders, and dressed dolls. I should not like to be a girl. We boys made sealing-wax hatpins, and elephants. Elephants are rather jolly to make. You get a bit of board and hammer four nails through it where you want the elephant’s legs to be. Then you put hot mixed glue and whitening on the nails, and quickly cover them with clay.

This sticks the clay to the nails. You put a lump of lead inside the body of the elephant to make it heavy, and you take your time modelling it. The man who does the taps and unstops the kitchen sink will always give you a bit of sheet-lead if you are polite to him, and do not mess about with his tool-basket when he is not looking. The honour of an Englishman makes me say that it was Miss Knox who taught us to make elephants. They ought to put that on her tombstone – if they cannot think of anything else. And when it is modelled as well as you can, you paint it over, wood and all, with silver paint, and it is a paperweight. But the village people bought all the ones we made, and put them on their mantelpieces for ornaments, so that now we cannot go into any of our friends’ cottages without meeting one of those elephants face to face.

We wished to make them as life-like as we could, so we got down Madeline’s silver elephant, which is solid and as big as your fist and came from India, where her sorrowing relatives are. Do not be afraid: I will not tell you more than I can help about the Bazaar. It was on Christmas Eve, and it was just like they all are. Except for one awful fact. The following is it.

Miss Knox – it was just exactly like her – took the silver elephant down to the schoolroom by mistake with the rest – and sold it for sixpence, the same as she sold the others!

It was Clifford, ever alert, who saw the elephant helpless in the grey kid grasp of a thin, smart lady with a lot of powder on her nose.

With the promptness of Napoleon or Nelson he rushed to Miss Knox and said, ‘You’ve sold the silver elephant!’

She smiled her gentle, patient smile, and said, ‘Yes, dear Clifford, every one of them.’

Clifford did not shake her.

‘I mean the real silver one,’ he said, as patient as she was, but not so cheerful.

She said she hadn’t.

Clifford is strong and active for his age. He got her out from behind her stall and told Olive to keep watch, and before she had stopped being surprised enough to resist he had led Miss Knox kindly but firmly to the door that the thin, powdery-nosed lady was just going out of. (Resistance would have been vain, anyhow, for our hero’s blood was up.)

‘There,’ he said; ‘tell her you’ve made a mistake,’ and he shoved Miss Knox forward politely but unmistakably.

She did say something to the lady, Clifford owns that. And the lady said something about a bargain being a bargain – he heard that, and then a herd of rafflers swept between; and when the horizon cleared the lady had got into a motor with the helpless elephant, and Miss Knox was standing like a mock turtle, with her mouth open, looking after her.

‘It is but a little sacrifice, after all, is it not, dear Clifford?’ she said in reply to what Clifford said; ‘and dear Madeline, I am sure, will only be too pleased to make it. We must give what we can, must we not, dear child?’

Were you ever called ‘dear child’ by anybody like Miss Knox? If so, you know. If not you never can.

Of course I had to tell Madeline; her passionate Southern nature – you know she was born in India – caused her to burst into tears in the middle of the Bazaar, before everyone, and say she wished Miss Knox was dead. Fortunately this was unheard by any but people who had no right to send her home without her tea and say ‘Bed!’

Clifford calmed her by promising, on his honour, to get the elephant back.

He tried to get at Mother to tell her about it and ask for justice, but she was surrounded by the rich and affluent, and he knew that several of these were coming home to dinner. Of course he would have waited till they had relieved the house of their hated presence, and then told Mother but for the discovery which awarded his detective-like researches. The thin, powdery lady, Clifford learned from the Dodds’ footman, was the one who had taken the Warings’ house for three months and turned it upside down, and she and her friends were going to have an early dinner, and motor up to London that very night. So what was an honourable boy to do?

Clifford tried to disentangle Martin from the sale of hatpins, and told him the fell truth. Madeline was clinging to him in a way Clifford would never have allowed at other times.

‘Get out,’ said Martin, ‘I’m busy.’

‘Come out,’ said Clifford in a dauntless whisper, ‘it is war. And no quarter. Prompt attention to business alone guarantees success!’

So then Martin saw that it was serious, and hastily letting a nasty lady have two hatpins for eighteenpence instead of the correct price, which was a shilling each, he joined us at the door.

‘This scene of revelry,’ said Clifford, ‘is a hollow mockery to the bereaved Madeline;’ and in a few well-chosen words he revealed the terrible preceding events.

‘The question is,’ said Martin, when Clifford had done revealing, ‘what are we to do?’

‘Prompt attention and cetera,’ murmured Clifford, lost in deep, masterly reflections.

‘Warings’ is a good mile and a half,’ said Martin.

‘Madeline,’ said Clifford in a hollow voice, ‘what would you do to get back the elephant you love?’

‘Anything,’ said Madeline, with feeble sniffs.

‘Would you be a burglar?’ he asked, his rich voice growing deeper.

‘Yes, if anyone would teach me how,’ said the bereaved one, sniffing more firmly.

‘And you?’ Clifford turned to Martin, who briefly signified that he was on.

‘Then, follow me,’ said our hero. ‘Silence! To the death!’

Our three conspirators went home through the snow arm in arm, with the wronged Madeline in the middle.

Everyone was at the Bazaar except the servants, who were getting the rich and affluents’ dinner ready.

We faced each other in the schoolroom by the light of Clifford’s bedroom candle, and Clifford remarked:

‘Never shall it be said that visitors from India’s coral strand had their innocent elephants stolen, with no one to lift a hand in defence of the helpless stranger. Martin! the dressing-up things.’

We kept these in a big bag hanging inside the schoolroom cupboard door. Clifford hastily examined them, electing, with the rapidness of a born dissembler, suitable disguises for all.

Martin wore the old striped riding-cloak we called ‘Joseph’ because of its many colours, and a felt hat with a feather that had been Olive’s in happier days. Madeline wore a black skirt of Mother’s that we use for Mary Queen of Scots, and a fur cape that is mangy all round the edges. Clifford got an old hat of Father’s and slouched it over his eyes – most burglarlike it was. Also he wore that old coat of Aunt Lucilla’s, with three capes – the one that makes you look like a highwayman. There was a large black crape veil. I don’t know where it came from, but I think that I have heard that a great-aunt’s face was once hid behind it. The flower-scissors from the table-drawer in the hall enabled us to convert this into masks, with holes for eyes, and tied round the back of the head with string. And the parts of our faces that the masks didn’t cover we blacked with the burnt cork of the cough-mixture bottle, out of the night nursery. We blacked our hands, too, inside and out. We went and looked at ourselves in the long swing-glass in Mother’s room.

We were terrible!

To get out without the servants seeing us was a triumph of dipsoplomacy. But we did it. Then we set out for Warings’. Madeline was trembling in every pore. But we have often explained to her that traitors and sneaks are loathed by the good and brave, so when Clifford stopped in the drive and said, ‘Don’t come if you don’t want to,’ she said: ‘Oh, but I do!’

(Note. – Is it better to be cowardly or untruthful? The author does not know the answer.)

It was at the gate that Martin said: ‘I say, Cliff, perhaps we hadn’t better, don’t you know?’

‘Hadn’t better what?’ asked our hero, who had steadily refused until now to unclose his plans.

‘Whatever it is you’re going to,’ said Martin.

Thus, you see, two of the burglars hung back; not because of its being wrong, but from funk. [24]  Clifford alone stood firm. He did not think it was wrong until later, when Father had carefully explained that it was.

‘I’m going to,’ he said, ‘but don’t you, either of you, if you don’t want to.’

They said they did want to, and having thus up-heartened his followers, the desperate leader disfolded his fell scheme.

It was ‘simple, sensible, and sublime,’ as the poet Milton, I believe, said all great things should be.

‘We’ll just walk straight up to Warings’. If we’re nabbed we’re Waits [53]. You can do “Nowell, Nowell,” I suppose? Well, then! if no one sees us we’ll just go straight in and search the house till we find the elephant. It’s ours, at least it’s Mad’s, so it’s not stealing. It’s an adventure, full of glory and renown. You go on back, if you haven’t the heart for it, and I’ll carry off that elephant single-handed. I don’t care. Go on back.’

Of course they didn’t, after that.

In silent heartbeatingness we went up the snowy avenue to Warings’. The house was lighted at most of the windows. We had thought of climbing in at the pantry window. We knew the house well, of course, because the Warings are friends of ours when they don’t let their house. But it seemed best to try the front door first. It was unlocked. Front doors mostly are, in the country, you know. So we just quietly opened the door and went in, and Clifford cautiously closed the door after them.

So far all was well, the adventure was running on oiled wheels, as the author of The Worst Boy in Bermondsey so beautifully remarks. And I am certain that the oil would have held out till the end but for Madeline.

(Moral: never you go burgling with a girl, even if it is her elephant that you are after.)

Alas! the passionate Southern nature does not fit you to be a burglar. The moment the front door was closed and she found herself alone in the hall with the stuffed foxes and the carved oak and the tall ticking clock and us, in our beautiful burglars’ clothes, she said ‘Oh!’ in a stifling whisper and bolted up the stairs like a hare when you’re coursing it.

We had to follow.

By a piece of A1 double-first luck, there were no servants about. We reached the carpeted landing. Madeline had bunked into the big state bedroom. We came up with her just in time to stop her from creeping under the bed. She was already lying on her front on the carpet, preparing for the under-bed act.

‘Don’t!’ said Clifford in stern undertones. ‘Come out of it!’

‘I must go under,’ she said wildly; ‘burglars always do.’

‘Not swell burglars,’ Martin said, ‘only commonies. Why did you bolt like that?’

‘It was you,’ she said, ‘when I saw you in the hall light. Walking up in the dark I’d forgotten how perfectly awful you look!’

How like a girl to blame it on to us.

All these remarks were in deep whispers.

Then we went and hung over the thick carved banisters and listened. Dressing up for our parts had taken some time, and the walk through the snow had taken more, and the powdery woman and her friends were now at their early dinner. We could hear the rattle of plates and silver and people talking and laughing. Everything people say at dinner when you are not there always seems to be more amusing than the things they say when you are there.

One of the upsetting things the powdery-nosed woman had done to the Warings’ house was turning the largest bedroom into a drawing-room. She thought a drawing-room ought to be on the first floor, because they are so in London. She did not know any better, because her husband was only a soap boiler. ‘The Boiling King’ they called him, because he was so rich. Well, indeed, could his wife, ‘The Boiling Queen,’ have afforded to send an express pink-faced messenger boy direct to India to fetch her a much larger silver elephant than Madeline’s, if she had really needed one!

A little research landed us in the drawing-room, and a rapid elephant-hunt at once began. Two of the hounds worked silently, but Madeline made a melancholy music all the time.

‘I wish we hadn’t come – I wish we hadn’t come – I wish we hadn’t come,’ she repeated in whispered accents, till Clifford had to pinch her arm to make her stop.

The silver elephant was run to earth on a sofa, among a lot of silly things that had been littering about at home for weeks, and which the Boiling Queen had bought at the Bazaar.

Madeline was reaching out for it when Martin caught her arm.

‘She paid sixpence for it,’ he said slowly. ‘Who’s got sixpence to leave here?’

Nobody had, of course.

‘We must be honest burglars, you know,’ said Martin firmly. And Clifford, who is the soul of honour, had to agree that this was so.

‘Couldn’t we send it by post?’ Madeline asked; ‘the sixpence, I mean.’

But the others were firm.

‘Burglary is a ready-money business,’ Clifford reminded her.

The more we stood and looked at each other the more Clifford and Martin saw that the game was now entirely up.

‘We had better,’ said Clifford flatly, ‘go home.’

He turned, prompt in retreat as in attack, to lead the way. Martin followed. At the bottom of the stairs which we had descended with tiptoe boots of the darkest caution, we turned. Madeline was still at the top.

‘Come on,’ we said with voiceless mouths, like cats on the other side of a glass window when you can see them mew but cannot hear.

‘I’m coming,’ she said, in the same voiceless speech. And she came. But, oh horror, oh woe! In the agitation of the midnight hour she had forgotten to hold up that old black skirt of Mother’s. Also, her shoe-lace had come undone, as she owned later.

But why seek to discover the cause of the disaster? Let me just say that as we looked up at Madeline, urging her to come to us, she came. She suddenly stumbled and pitched right down the stairs, absolutely on to us, with a row that I have never heard equalled, even when tobogganing downstairs on tea-trays, which is now forbidden.

Our unwilling bodies broke the force of her fall. Otherwise that fall might have been her last.

You know how bees come out buzzing and thick when you throw half a brick at the hive? It was like that when the dining-room door burst open, and the people who were having dinner swarmed out to witness the unusual spectacle of three masked figures struggling on the fur mat at the foot of the stairs.

‘Burglars!’

‘Masked, by Jove!’

‘Negroes!’

‘Several of them!’

Remarks like these burst from more than one observant lip.

A young man with hair like hay collared me. A fat man with a watch chain and seals hanging off the edge of him got Martin, and Madeline was left sitting on the mat, with her feet straight out in front of her, howling like a forgotten foxhound puppy on a wet night. Quite lost to all proper feeling, she was.

Clifford and Martin preserved a dignified silence when they were lugged out of the dim hall into the blazing light of the diningroom, and Madeline was carried in and put on a chair. She sat there sobbing and loosely holding in her hand. . . not the elephant, but a silver stamp-box in the shape of a pig! This was the last straw of degradedness. We were thieves!

She had crept back to collar her elephant and had grabbed this by mistake. So we were really thieves after all. And taken red-handed! It was indeed a dark and terrible moment: one of the darkest and most terrible that this author has ever known; all these strange faces crowding round, all angry, all frightened, all distrustful. It is terrible to be distrusted.

‘Why,’ said one of them suddenly, ‘they’re only children – children dressed up! But one of them’s stolen your lucky pig, Christine.’

‘It’s not your pig, it’s my own elephant,’ sobbed Madeline. Then, looking down, she saw what it really was, and the deceitful pig dropped from her nerveless fingers and rattled on the floor.

‘Come,’ said a stern voice from above the waistcoat that the seals hung from, ‘out with it. What’s the meaning of all this?’ Madeline sobbed. Martin kicked one boot against the other in stubborn silence. His followers were worse than useless. The bold leader had to face his reversion of fortune alone and unaided. He owns that he did not know how to face it.

‘You poor little chap, don’t look so frightened. It was a game, wasn’t it?’ said the powdered lady suddenly, and you will be surprised to learn that she addressed these words to the dauntless leader. She meant well, I do think, but that is not the way to speak to burglars. She had diamond stars in her hair and a necklace of diamonds on her scraggy neck.

‘Take off that rubbish,’ said the hay-haired man. And they tore our disguises from us, and we stood there unmasked. Concealment really was, this time, at an end.

‘Come, speak up,’ said the waistcoat-seal gentleman. ‘What’s the meaning of this tomfoolery?’

Clifford stood alone, like the boy on the burning deck, only he is never beautiful (he would, of course, scorn to be), and just then he did not feel bright, and he did not feel at all able to rule the storm that he saw raging about him.

‘What shall I say?’ he asked himself, and felt with a sinking heart that there was nothing that it would be any good to say, except the truth.

So he drew a long breath and said: ‘We haven’t taken anything but the pig, and I didn’t know we’d got that, and Madeline thought it was an elephant.’

‘Am I mad?’ said the powder-nosed lady, who was the nicest of the lot – I will say that for her – ‘or are you?’

‘I’m not,’ said Clifford; and to this day he knows not why they all laughed so much.

Anyhow, the laugh made it easier to speak. With that clearness that he has often been praised for, and that perhaps you have noticed in this narrative, he told the whole truth from the beginning. It took some time, but he persevered to the end. And when he had done everyone clapped, and the powder-nosed lady with the diamond stars kissed him before he could resist. It was most unfair.

‘Why, the poor dears!’ she said. ‘I had no idea! I only stuck to the precious elephant because I couldn’t stand that soapy-faced woman who wanted to get it back. The poor little dears! And the pluck of them! Get their precious elephant, someone, for goodness’ sake!’

They were really very nice people, though they weren’t like Mother and Father. ‘Somebody’ fetched Madeline’s silver elephant, and they got her to stop crying, and kissed her, too – I’m glad she didn’t get off that – and gave us all dessert with peaches – it was Christmas Eve, you remember – and the loveliest sweets. And the lady wanted Madeline to have the silver pig as well, but Martin and I wouldn’t let her. We knew in our inside selves Father wouldn’t like us to. And we had a ripping time, and they took us home in one of their motors, with a bump on Madeline’s head as big as a teacup, tied up with scent and the powdernosed lady’s hankie. They called Clifford a hero, which was silly, but pleasant.

•      •      •      •

It was not so pleasant, though, when we had to tell Father and Mother about it, which we decided had better be done the moment the rich and affluents were gone, before giving ourselves time to think it over. Father was very angry, and Mother was very grieved. They said we had disgraced them. I could not see this, and I never shall. But I was sorry they thought so. And so I said I was sorry. If they said it was wrong, of course it was, so I wished we hadn’t. And as it was Christmas Eve we were forgiven at once, and got off any consequences that might have happened on other dates. No one said anything about forgiving Miss Knox, though; and yet, of course, the whole thing was entirely her silly fault.

But next day was Christmas Day, when you ought to forgive everybody everything. So Madeline and I agreed that we should feel more comfortable in our insides if we did. So we went to Miss Knox, and Madeline said what we had agreed on. It was:

‘Miss Knox, please, we forgive you about my elephant because it is Christmas Day.’ But Madeline mumbled it so that I couldn’t hear what she said. No more could Miss Knox. For her reply was:

‘Of course I forgive you, dear Madeline. And dear Clifford, too. But we should be more thoughtful for the feelings of others, should we not, dear children? And I am sure you did not mean what you said.’

By this we knew that she had heard what Madeline said when the elephant was borne away from the Bazaar.

So Miss Knox forgave us! And we had to bear it.

But it was Christmas Day, and we had lots of jolly presents. Miss Knox gave us each a box of chocks. [13]  This rather choked me off hating her, I own. Not because of the beastly chocks, but because I know she wasn’t well off. She must have gone without something to give the chocks to us. Yet I don’t trust her any more because of the chocks. I know she wants to get things out of Mother. But it was kind of her. Life is very difficult to understand.

So I forgive her for forgiving us. But perhaps she isn’t so black as she’s painted, any more than we were, under the masks, when we were self-sacrificing burglars, and risked our liberty for the sake of the stolen elephant.

•  The End  •

Glossary

[01]   Aeroplane:

British term for airplane.

[02]   Baize:

A bright green fabric like felt, often used for game tables.

[03]   Bats and Stumps:

Cricket accessories.

[04]   Beano:

(British) Short for bean-feast, a colloquial term for a noisy festive occasion.

[05]   Biscuits:

British usage: Any of various small flat sweet cakes or cookies.

[06]   Brick, Brickish:

A good fellow (person); helpful and trustworthy.

[07]   Bullseyes:

A caramel candy with a white creamy center.

[08]   Bungalow:

A residential building, normally detached, which is either single-story or has a second story built into a sloping roof, usually with dormer windows (one-and-a-half stories).

[09]   Bunk:

To leave suddenly and unexpectedly. To leave inappropriately, as in to “bunk off” school or work (“playing hooky” or “truant”).

[10]   Caitiff:

A base, despicable person.

[11]   Cave:

(Latin) Beware!

“keep cave”: to be a guard or lookout, ready to signal a warning.

[12]   Cheek:

Impudence, sassiness. Rudeness.

[13]   Chocks:

Slang: Chocolates.

[14]   Collars … :

In those times, men and boys wore detachable collars, attached to the shirt with studs. The collar was usually white, and was starched stiff as cardboard. Collars made of paper were worn by the less well-to-do.

[15]   Copper:

British usage: A large kettle, now usually made of iron, used for cooking or to boil laundry.

[16]   Cricket:

Cricket is a bat-and-ball game played on a field between two teams of 11 players each. It is the world's second most popular sport.

[17]   Crown:

An English coin worth 5 shillings.

[54]   Dark-lantern:

A lantern having an opening with a shutter that can be slid across the opening to obscure the light.

[55]   Dene-hole:

A dene-hole is an underground structure consisting of a number of small chalk caves entered by a vertical shaft. The chalk uplands of Kent once contained many hundreds, if not thousands, of dene-holes of various types. The origins and purpose of these man-made excavations was the subject of intense interest and debate in the latter 19th century.

[18]   Draughts:

The game of checkers.

[19]   Duffer:

An incompetent, stupid, or clumsy person.

[20]   Ekker:

(British, university or school slang) Homework; a scolastic exercise or task. (From the first syllable of “exercise.”)

[21]   Equerry:

An officer of honor. Historically, it was a senior attendant with responsibilities for the horses of a person of rank.

[22]   Eton jacket:

A boy's waist-length jacket with wide lapels and an open front and a V-shaped back, formerly worn by students of Eton College in England.

[23]   Forms:

Shaped desk tops for students.

[24]   Funk:

1) A state of nervous depression or fear.

2) To draw back, as with fear or pain.

[25]   Gewgaws:

Something gaudy and useless, small decorative items: trinket, bauble, knick-knack, tchotchke.

[26]   Ginger-beer:

Carbonated slightly alcoholic drink flavored with fermented ginger. (In those days, children were permitted to drink ginger-beer. Now we have non-alcoholic ginger ale soda.)

[27]   Greengage:

A variety of plum tree, with edible sweet green plumlike fruits.

[28]   Grub:

(Slang) Food.

[29]   Halma:

A board game in which players try to move their pieces into their opponent’s bases.

[30]   Happy Families:

A traditional card game, with special picture cards illustrating fictional families of four, most often based on occupation types. The object of the game is to collect complete families. (Similar to Go Fish.)

[31]   Hippodrome:

A music hall, variety theater, or circus. Also an arena or structure for equestrian and other spectacles.

[32]   Hols:

(British slang) Holidays. Often referring to school holidays or breaks.

[33]   In loco parentis:

(Latin) In the place or role of a parent; said of a person acting in a parental capacity.

[34]   Jarrah wood:

A common species of Eucalyptus tree in Australia, referred to by the Aboriginal name jarrah.

[35]   Jemmy:

(British) [US: Jimmy] A short crowbar used to force open a door, window, etc.

[36]   Larder:

A cool area for storing food prior to use. Larders were commonplace in houses before the widespread use of the refrigerator.

[37]   Lark:

A carefree diversion. Any happy recreation or play.

[38]   Ludo:

(British) A simple board game in which players advance counters by throwing dice.

[39]   Mangle:

(British) [US: Wringer] A mechanical laundry aid consisting of two rollers in a sturdy frame, used to wring water from wet laundry.

[40]   Mimsy:

Rather feeble and prim or affected; prudish and exceedingly “proper.”

[41]   Muff:

(Colloquial) A fool, a stupid or poor-spirited person. [from 19th century.]

[42]   Overmantel:

A shelf over a mantelpiece. Sometimes, an ornamental structure (such as a painting or mirror) above a mantelpiece.

[43]   Paling:

A palisade or stakewall; a fence or wall made from wooden stakes or tree trunks and used as a defensive structure or enclosure.

[44]   Quoits:

A game in which rings of rope or flattened metal are thrown at an upright peg, the object being to encircle it or come as close to it as possible. (Similar to “horseshoes” in the US.)

[45]   Row:

British usage: An angry dispute; a disturbance or uproar. (pronounced like “cow.”)

[46]   Rum, rummy:

British usage: Odd, peculiar; deviating from the normal.

[47]   Spillikins:

Also called Spellikins, Jack-Straws, or Pick-Up-Sticks. A game to take turns removing single sticks from a random pile without disturbing the remaining sticks.

[48]   Tea-time:

(British) A light midafternoon meal of tea and sandwiches or cakes.

[49]   Throstle:

(British, chiefly literary) The song thrush.

[50]   Topper:

A top hat (also called opera hat, silk hat). A tall, cylindrical hat with a stiff brim usually slightly curved on the sides, worn by men, especially on formal occasions.

[51]   Tree-calf binding:

A highly polished calf-leather book binding in which the leather has been stained to produce a dark tree-like pattern; the process originated in the late 18th century.

[52]   Villa:

British usage: A detached or semidetached suburban house.

[53]   Waits:

Christmas carolers.

As early as the year 1300, groups of waits (night watchmen) formed groups and sang and danced their way through carols for the entertainment of their neighbors and to earn a few extra pence or flagon of ale from the gentlefolk they watched over.

[56]   Wax:

British slang usage: A fit of anger, rage.