The E. Nesbit Megapack: 26 Classic Novels and Stories (171 page)

‘I think you’ve had jolly well enough. You can’t be really thirsty after all that lot.’

The boy said, ‘Oh, can’t I? You’ll just see if I can’t,’ and went away. Presently he came back with four other boys, all bigger than Oswald; and they all asked for lemonade. Oswald gave it to the four new ones, but he was determined in his behaviour to the other one, and wouldn’t give him a drop. Then the five of them went and sat on a gate a little way off and kept laughing in a nasty way, and whenever a boy went by they called out—

‘I say, ’ere’s a go,’ and as often as not the new boy would hang about with them. It was disquieting, for though they had nearly all had lemonade we could see it had not made them friendly.

A great glorious glow of goodness gladdened (those go all together and are called alliteration) our hearts when we saw our own tramp coming down the road. The dogs did not growl at him as they had at the boys or the beer-man. (I did not say before that we had the dogs with us, but of course we had, because we had promised never to go out without them.) Oswald said, ‘Hullo,’ and the tramp said, ‘Hullo.’ Then Alice said, ‘You see we’ve taken your advice; we’re giving free drinks. Doesn’t it all look nice?’

‘It does that,’ said the tramp. ‘I don’t mind if I do.’

So we gave him two glasses of lemonade succeedingly, and thanked him for giving us the idea. He said we were very welcome, and if we’d no objection he’d sit down a bit and put on a pipe. He did, and after talking a little more he fell asleep. Drinking anything seemed to end in sleep with him. I always thought it was only beer and things made people sleepy, but he was not so. When he was asleep he rolled into the ditch, but it did not wake him up.

The boys were getting very noisy, and they began to shout things, and to make silly noises with their mouths, and when Oswald and Dicky went over to them and told them to just chuck it, they were worse than ever. I think perhaps Oswald and Dicky might have fought and settled them—though there were eleven, yet back to back you can always do it against overwhelming numbers in a book—only Alice called out—

‘Oswald, here’s some more, come back!’

We went. Three big men were coming down the road, very red and hot, and not amiable-looking. They stopped in front of the Benevolent Bar and slowly read the wadding and red-stuff label.

Then one of them said he was blessed, or something like that, and another said he was too. The third one said, ‘Blessed or not, a drink’s a drink. Blue ribbon, though, by ——’ (a word you ought not to say, though it is in the Bible and the catechism as well). ‘Let’s have a liquor, little missy.’

The dogs were growling, but Oswald thought it best not to take any notice of what the dogs said, but to give these men each a drink. So he did. They drank, but not as if they cared about it very much, and then they set their glasses down on the table, a liberty no one else had entered into, and began to try and chaff Oswald. Oswald said in an undervoice to H. O.—

‘Just take charge. I want to speak to the girls a sec. Call if you want anything.’ And then he drew the others away, to say he thought there’d been enough of it, and considering the boys and new three men, perhaps we’d better chuck it and go home. We’d been benevolent nearly four hours anyway.

While this conversation and the objections of the others were going on, H. O. perpetuated an act which nearly wrecked the Benevolent Bar.

Of course Oswald was not an eye or ear witness of what happened, but from what H. O. said in the calmer moments of later life, I think this was about what happened. One of the big disagreeable men said to H. O.—

‘Ain’t got such a thing as a drop o’ spirit, ‘ave yer?’

H. O. said no, we hadn’t, only lemonade and tea.

‘Lemonade and tea! blank’ (bad word I told you about) ‘and blazes,’ replied the bad character, for such he afterwards proved to be. ‘What’s
that
then?’

He pointed to a bottle labelled Dewar’s whisky, which stood on the table near the spirit-kettle.

‘Oh, is
that
what you want?’ said H. O. kindly.

The man is understood to have said he should bloomin’ well think so, but H. O. is not sure about the ‘bloomin.’

He held out his glass with about half the lemonade in it, and H. O. generously filled up the tumbler out of the bottle, labelled Dewar’s whisky. The man took a great drink, and then suddenly he spat out what happened to be left in his mouth just then, and began to swear. It was then that Oswald and Dicky rushed upon the scene.

The man was shaking his fist in H. O.’s face, and H. O. was still holding on to the bottle we had brought out the methylated spirit in for the lamp, in case of anyone wanting tea, which they hadn’t. ‘If I was Jim,’ said the second ruffian, for such indeed they were, when he had snatched the bottle from H. O. and smelt it, ‘I’d chuck the whole show over the hedge, so I would, and you young gutter-snipes after it, so I wouldn’t.’

Oswald saw in a moment that in point of strength, if not numbers, he and his party were out-matched, and the unfriendly boys were drawing gladly near. It is no shame to signal for help when in distress—the best ships do it every day. Oswald shouted ‘Help, help!’ Before the words were out of his brave yet trembling lips our own tramp leapt like an antelope from the ditch and said—

‘Now then, what’s up?’

The biggest of the three men immediately knocked him down. He lay still.

The biggest then said, ‘Come on—any more of you? Come on!’

Oswald was so enraged at this cowardly attack that he actually hit out at the big man—and he really got one in just above the belt. Then he shut his eyes, because he felt that now all was indeed up. There was a shout and a scuffle, and Oswald opened his eyes in astonishment at finding himself still whole and unimpaired. Our own tramp had artfully simulated insensibleness, to get the men off their guard, and then had suddenly got his arms round a leg each of two of the men, and pulled them to the ground, helped by Dicky, who saw his game and rushed in at the same time, exactly like Oswald would have done if he had not had his eyes shut ready to meet his doom.

The unpleasant boys shouted, and the third man tried to help his unrespectable friends, now on their backs involved in a desperate struggle with our own tramp, who was on top of them, accompanied by Dicky. It all happened in a minute, and it was all mixed up. The dogs were growling and barking—Martha had one of the men by the trouser leg and Pincher had another; the girls were screaming like mad and the strange boys shouted and laughed (little beasts!), and then suddenly our Pig-man came round the corner, and two friends of his with him. He had gone and fetched them to take care of us if anything unpleasant occurred. It was a very thoughtful, and just like him.

‘Fetch the police!’ cried the Pig-man in noble tones, and H. O. started running to do it. But the scoundrels struggled from under Dicky and our tramp, shook off the dogs and some bits of trouser, and fled heavily down the road.

Our Pig-man said, ‘Get along home!’ to the disagreeable boys, and ‘Shoo’d’ them as if they were hens, and they went. H. O. ran back when they began to go up the road, and there we were, all standing breathless in tears on the scene of the late desperate engagement. Oswald gives you his word of honour that his and Dicky’s tears were tears of pure rage. There are such things as tears of pure rage. Anyone who knows will tell you so.

We picked up our own tramp and bathed the lump on his forehead with lemonade. The water in the zinc bath had been upset in the struggle. Then he and the Pig-man and his kind friends helped us carry our things home.

The Pig-man advised us on the way not to try these sort of kind actions without getting a grown-up to help us. We’ve been advised this before, but now I really think we shall never try to be benevolent to the poor and needy again. At any rate not unless we know them very well first.

We have seen our own tramp often since. The Pig-man gave him a job. He has got work to do at last. The Pig-man says he is not such a very bad chap, only he will fall asleep after the least drop of drink. We know that is his failing. We saw it at once. But it was lucky for us he fell asleep that day near our benevolent bar.

I will not go into what my father said about it all. There was a good deal in it about minding your own business—there generally is in most of the talkings-to we get. But he gave our tramp a sovereign, and the Pig-man says he went to sleep on it for a solid week.

CHAPTER 12

THE CANTERBURY PILGRIMS

The author of these few lines really doe
s hope to goodness that no one will be such an owl as to think from the number of things we did when we were in the country, that we were wretched, neglected little children, whose grown-up relations sparkled in the bright haunts of pleasure, and whirled in the giddy what’s-its-name of fashion, while we were left to weep forsaken at home. It was nothing of the kind, and I wish you to know that my father was with us a good deal—and Albert’s uncle (who is really no uncle of ours, but only of Albert next door when we lived in Lewisham) gave up a good many of his valuable hours to us. And the father of Denny and Daisy came now and then, and other people, quite as many as we wished to see. And we had some very decent times with them; and enjoyed ourselves very much indeed, thank you. In some ways the good times you have with grown-ups are better than the ones you have by yourselves. At any rate they are safer. It is almost impossible, then, to do anything fatal without being pulled up short by a grown-up ere yet the deed is done. And, if you are careful, anything that goes wrong can be looked on as the grown-up’s fault. But these secure pleasures are not so interesting to tell about as the things you do when there is no one to stop you on the edge of the rash act.

It is curious, too, that many of our most interesting games happened when grown-ups were far away. For instance when we were pilgrims.

It was just after the business of the Benevolent Bar, and it was a wet day. It is not easy to amuse yourself indoors on a wet day as older people seem to think, especially when you are far removed from your own home, and haven’t got all your own books and things. The girls were playing Halma—which is a beastly game—Noël was writing poetry, H. O. was singing ‘I don’t know what to do’ to the tune of ‘Canaan’s happy shore.’ It goes like this, and is very tiresome to listen to—

‘I don’t know what to do—oo—oo—oo!

I don’t know what to do—oo—oo!

It
is
a beastly rainy day

And I don’t know what to do.’

The rest of us were trying to make him shut up. We put a carpet bag over his head, but he went on inside it; and then we sat on him, but he sang under us; we held him upside down and made him crawl head first under the sofa, but when, even there, he kept it up, we saw that nothing short of violence would induce him to silence, so we let him go. And then he said we had hurt him, and we said we were only in fun, and he said if we were he wasn’t, and ill feeling might have grown up even out of a playful brotherly act like ours had been, only Alice chucked the Halma and said—

‘Let dogs delight. Come on—let’s play something.’

Then Dora said, ‘Yes, but look here. Now we’re together I do want to say something. What about the Wouldbegoods Society?’

Many of us groaned, and one said, ‘Hear! hear!’ I will not say which one, but it was not Oswald.

‘No, but really,’ Dora said, ‘I don’t want to be preachy—but you know we
did
say we’d try to be good. And it says in a book I was reading only yesterday that
not
being naughty is not enough. You must
be
good. And we’ve hardly done anything. The Golden Deed book’s almost empty.’

‘Couldn’t we have a book of leaden deeds?’ said Noël, coming out of his poetry, ‘then there’d be plenty for Alice to write about if she wants to, or brass or zinc or aluminium deeds? We shan’t ever fill the book with golden ones.’

H. O. had rolled himself in the red tablecloth and said Noël was only advising us to be naughty, and again peace waved in the balance. But Alice said, ‘Oh, H. O.,
Don’t
—he didn’t mean that; but really and truly, I wish wrong things weren’t so interesting. You begin to do a noble act, and then it gets so exciting, and before you know where you are you are doing something wrong as hard as you can lick.’

‘And enjoying it too’ Dick said.

‘It’s very curious,’ Denny said, ‘but you don’t seem to be able to be certain inside yourself whether what you’re doing is right if you happen to like doing it, but if you don’t like doing it you know quite well. I only thought of that just now. I wish Noël would make a poem about it.’

‘I am,’ Noël said; ‘it began about a crocodile but it is finishing itself up quite different from what I meant it to at first. Just wait a minute.’

He wrote very hard while his kind brothers and sisters and his little friends waited the minute he had said, and then he read:

‘The crocodile is very wise,

He lives in the Nile with little eyes,

He eats the hippopotamus too,

And if he could he would eat up you.

‘The lovely woods and starry skies

He looks upon with glad surprise!

He sees the riches of the east,

And the tiger and lion, kings of beast.

‘So let all be good and beware

Of saying shan’t and won’t and don’t care;

For doing wrong is easier far

Than any of the right things I know about are.

And I couldn’t make it king of beasts

Because of it not rhyming with east,

So I put the s off beasts onto king.

It comes even in the end.’

We all said it was a very nice piece of poetry. Noël gets really ill if you don’t like what he writes, and then he said, ‘If it’s trying that’s wanted, I don’t care how hard we
try
to be good, but we may as well do it some nice way. Let’s be Pilgrim’s Progress, like I wanted to at first.’

And we were all beginning to say we didn’t want to, when suddenly Dora said, ‘Oh, look here! I know. We’ll be the Canterbury Pilgrims. People used to go pilgrimages to make themselves good.’

‘With peas in their shoes,’ the Dentist said. ‘It’s in a piece of poetry—only the man boiled his peas—which is quite unfair.’

‘Oh, yes,’ said H. O., ‘and cocked hats.’

‘Not cocked—cockled’—it was Alice who said this. ‘And they had staffs and scrips, and they told each other tales. We might as well.’

Oswald and Dora had been reading about the Canterbury Pilgrims in a book called A Short History of the English People. It is not at all short really—three fat volumes—but it has jolly good pictures. It was written by a gentleman named Green. So Oswald said—

‘All right. I’ll be the Knight.’

‘I’ll be the wife of Bath,’ Dora said. ‘What will you be, Dicky?’

‘Oh, I don’t care, I’ll be Mr Bath if you like.’

‘We don’t know much about the people,’ Alice said. ‘How many were there?’

‘Thirty,’ Oswald replied, ‘but we needn’t be all of them. There’s a Nun-Priest.’

‘Is that a man or a woman?’

Oswald said he could not be sure by the picture, but Alice and Noël could be it between them. So that was settled. Then we got the book and looked at the dresses to see if we could make up dresses for the parts. At first we thought we would, because it would be something to do, and it was a very wet day; but they looked difficult, especially the Miller’s. Denny wanted to be the Miller, but in the end he was the Doctor, because it was next door to Dentist, which is what we call him for short. Daisy was to be the Prioress—because she is good, and has ‘a soft little red mouth,’ and H. O.
would
be the Manciple (I don’t know what that is), because the picture of him is bigger than most of the others, and he said Manciple was a nice portmanteau word—half mandarin and half disciple.