A	>>	B	>>	C	>>	D	>>	E
F	>>	G	>>	H	>>	I	>>	J
K	>>	L	>>	M	>>	N	>>	O
P	>>	R	>>	S	>>	T	>>	U
V	>>	W	>>			X	>>	Z

George MacDonald - "Sir Gibbie"

Sara Jeanette Duncan - "The Pool in the Desert"

Wilkie Collins - "The Legacy of Cain"

Lord Dunsany - "If"

The Wouldbegoods

E >> E. Nesbit >> The Wouldbegoods




It was jolly to be in the sunshine again. I never knew before how
cold it was underground. The stream was getting smaller and
smaller.

Dicky said, 'This can't be the way. I expect there was a turning
to the North Pole inside the tunnel, only we missed it. It was
cold enough there.'

But here a twist in the stream brought us out from the bushes, and
Oswald said--

'Here is strange, wild, tropical vegetation in the richest
profusion. Such blossoms as these never opened in a frigid
what's-its-name.'

It was indeed true. We had come out into a sort of marshy, swampy
place like I think, a jungle is, that the stream ran through, and
it was simply crammed with queer plants, and flowers we never saw
before or since. And the stream was quite thin. It was torridly
hot, and softish to walk on. There were rushes and reeds and small
willows, and it was all tangled over with different sorts of
grasses--and pools here and there. We saw no wild beasts, but
there were more different kinds of wild flies and beetles than you
could believe anybody could bear, and dragon-flies and gnats. The
girls picked a lot of flowers. I know the names of some of them,
but I will not tell you them because this is not meant to be
instructing. So I will only name meadow-sweet, yarrow,
loose-strife, lady's bed-straw and willow herb--both the larger and
the lesser.

Everyone now wished to go home. It was much hotter there than in
natural fields. It made you want to tear all your clothes off and
play at savages, instead of keeping respectable in your boots.

But we had to bear the boots because it was so brambly.

It was Oswald who showed the others how flat it would be to go home
the same way we came; and he pointed out the telegraph wires in the
distance and said--

'There must be a road there, let's make for it,' which was quite a
simple and ordinary thing to say, and he does not ask for any
credit for it. So we sloshed along, scratching our legs with the
brambles, and the water squelched in our boots, and Alice's blue
muslin frock was torn all over in those crisscross tears which are
considered so hard to darn.

We did not follow the stream any more. It was only a trickle now,
so we knew we had tracked it to its source. And we got hotter and
hotter and hotter, and the dews of agony stood in beads on our
brows and rolled down our noses and off our chins. And the flies
buzzed, and the gnats stung, and Oswald bravely sought to keep up
Dicky's courage, when he tripped on a snag and came down on a
bramble bush, by saying--

'You see it IS the source of the Nile we've discovered. What price
North Poles now?'

Alice said, 'Ah, but think of ices! I expect Oswald wishes it HAD
been the Pole, anyway.'

Oswald is naturally the leader, especially when following up what
is his own idea, but he knows that leaders have other duties
besides just leading. One is to assist weak or wounded members of
the expedition, whether Polar or Equatorish.

So the others had got a bit ahead through Oswald lending the
tottering Denny a hand over the rough places. Denny's feet hurt
him, because when he was a beaver his stockings had dropped out of
his pocket, and boots without stockings are not a bed of
luxuriousness. And he is often unlucky with his feet.

Presently we came to a pond, and Denny said--

'Let's paddle.'

Oswald likes Denny to have ideas; he knows it is healthy for the
boy, and generally he backs him up, but just now it was getting
late and the others were ahead, so he said--

'Oh, rot! come on.'

Generally the Dentist would have; but even worms will turn if they
are hot enough, and if their feet are hurting them.
'I don't care, I shall!' he said.

Oswald overlooked the mutiny and did not say who was leader. He
just said--

'Well don't be all day about it,' for he is a kind-hearted boy and
can make allowances.
So Denny took off his boots and went into the pool. 'Oh, it's
ripping!' he said. 'You ought to come in.'

'It looks beastly muddy,' said his tolerating leader.

'It is a bit,' Denny said, 'but the mud's just as cool as the
water, and so soft, it squeezes between your toes quite different
to boots.'

And so he splashed about, and kept asking Oswald to come along in.

But some unseen influence prevented Oswald doing this; or it may
have been because both his bootlaces were in hard knots.

Oswald had cause to bless the unseen influence, or the bootlaces,
or whatever it was.

Denny had got to the middle of the pool, and he was splashing
about, and getting his clothes very wet indeed, and altogether you
would have thought his was a most envious and happy state. But
alas! the brightest cloud had a waterproof lining. He was just
saying--

'You are a silly, Oswald. You'd much better--' when he gave a
blood-piercing scream, and began to kick about.

'What's up?' cried the ready Oswald; he feared the worst from the
way Denny screamed, but he knew it could not be an old meat tin in
this quiet and jungular spot, like it was in the moat when the
shark bit Dora.

'I don't know, it's biting me. Oh, it's biting me all over my
legs! Oh, what shall I do? Oh, it does hurt! Oh! oh! oh!'
remarked Denny, among his screams, and he splashed towards the
bank. Oswald went into the water and caught hold of him and helped
him out. It is true that Oswald had his boots on, but I trust he
would not have funked the unknown terrors of the deep, even without
his boots, I am almost sure he would not have.

When Denny had scrambled and been hauled ashore, we saw with horror
and amaze that his legs were stuck all over with large black,
slug-looking things. Denny turned green in the face--and even
Oswald felt a bit queer, for he knew in a moment what the black
dreadfulnesses were. He had read about them in a book called
Magnet Stories, where there was a girl called Theodosia, and she
could play brilliant trebles on the piano in duets, but the other
girl knew all about leeches which is much more useful and golden
deedy. Oswald tried to pull the leeches off, but they wouldn't,
and Denny howled so he had to stop trying. He remembered from the
Magnet Stories how to make the leeches begin biting--the girl did
it with cream--but he could not remember how to stop them, and they
had not wanted any showing how to begin.

'Oh, what shall I do? What shall I do? Oh, it does hurt! Oh,
oh!' Denny observed, and Oswald said--

'Be a man! Buck up! If you won't let me take them off you'll just
have to walk home in them.'

At this thought the unfortunate youth's tears fell fast. But
Oswald gave him an arm, and carried his boots for him, and he
consented to buck up, and the two struggled on towards the others,
who were coming back, attracted by Denny's yells. He did not stop
howling for a moment, except to breathe. No one ought to blame him
till they have had eleven leeches on their right leg and six on
their left, making seventeen in all, as Dicky said, at once.

It was lucky he did yell, as it turned out, because a man on the
road--where the telegraph wires were--was interested by his howls,
and came across the marsh to us as hard as he could. When he saw
Denny's legs he said--

'Blest if I didn't think so,' and he picked Denny up and carried
him under one arm, where Denny went on saying 'Oh!' and 'It does
hurt' as hard as ever.

Our rescuer, who proved to be a fine big young man in the bloom of
youth, and a farm-labourer by trade, in corduroys, carried the
wretched sufferer to the cottage where he lived with his aged
mother; and then Oswald found that what he had forgotten about the
leeches was SALT. The young man in the bloom of youth's mother put
salt on the leeches, and they squirmed off, and fell with
sickening, slug-like flops on the brick floor.

Then the young man in corduroys and the bloom, etc., carried Denny
home on his back, after his legs had been bandaged up, so that he
looked like 'wounded warriors returning'.

It was not far by the road, though such a long distance by the way
the young explorers had come.

He was a good young man, and though, of course, acts of goodness
are their own reward, still I was glad he had the two half-crowns
Albert's uncle gave him, as well as his own good act. But I am not
sure Alice ought to have put him in the Golden Deed book which was
supposed to be reserved for Us.

Perhaps you will think this was the end of the source of the Nile
(or North Pole). If you do, it only shows how mistaken the
gentlest reader may be.

The wounded explorer was lying with his wounds and bandages on the
sofa, and we were all having our tea, with raspberries and white
currants, which we richly needed after our torrid adventures, when
Mrs Pettigrew, the housekeeper, put her head in at the door and
said--

'Please could I speak to you half a moment, sir?' to Albert's
uncle. And her voice was the kind that makes you look at each
other when the grown-up has gone out, and you are silent, with your
bread-and-butter halfway to the next bite, or your teacup in mid
flight to your lips.

It was as we suppose. Albert's uncle did not come back for a long
while. We did not keep the bread-and-butter on the wing all that
time, of course, and we thought we might as well finish the
raspberries and white currants. We kept some for Albert's uncle,
of course, and they were the best ones too but when he came back he
did not notice our thoughtful unselfishness.

He came in, and his face wore the look that means bed, and very
likely no supper.

He spoke, and it was the calmness of white-hot iron, which is
something like the calmness of despair. He said--

'You have done it again. What on earth possessed you to make a
dam?'

'We were being beavers,' said H. O., in proud tones. He did not
see as we did where Albert's uncle's tone pointed to.

'No doubt,' said Albert's uncle, rubbing his hands through his
hair. 'No doubt! no doubt! Well, my beavers, you may go and build
dams with your bolsters. Your dam stopped the stream; the clay you
took for it left a channel through which it has run down and ruined
about seven pounds' worth of freshly-reaped barley. Luckily the
farmer found it out in time or you might have spoiled seventy
pounds' worth. And you burned a bridge yesterday.'

We said we were sorry. There was nothing else to say, only Alice
added, 'We didn't MEAN to be naughty.'

'Of course not,' said Albert's uncle, 'you never do. Oh, yes, I'll
kiss you--but it's bed and it's two hundred lines to-morrow, and
the line is--"Beware of Being Beavers and Burning Bridges. Dread
Dams." It will be a capital exercise in capital B's and D's.'

We knew by that that, though annoyed, he was not furious; we went
to bed.

I got jolly sick of capital B's and D's before sunset on the
morrow. That night, just as the others were falling asleep, Oswald
said--

'I say.'

'Well,' retorted his brother.

'There is one thing about it,' Oswald went on, 'it does show it was
a rattling good dam anyhow.'

And filled with this agreeable thought, the weary beavers (or
explorers, Polar or otherwise) fell asleep.



CHAPTER 8
THE HIGH-BORN BABE

It really was not such a bad baby--for a baby. Its face was round
and quite clean, which babies' faces are not always, as I daresay
you know by your own youthful relatives; and Dora said its cape was
trimmed with real lace, whatever that may be--I don't see myself
how one kind of lace can be realler than another. It was in a very
swagger sort of perambulator when we saw it; and the perambulator
was standing quite by itself in the lane that leads to the mill.

'I wonder whose baby it is,' Dora said. 'Isn't it a darling,
Alice?'

Alice agreed to its being one, and said she thought it was most
likely the child of noble parents stolen by gipsies.

'These two, as likely as not,' Noel said. 'Can't you see something
crime-like in the very way they're lying?'

They were two tramps, and they were lying on the grass at the edge
of the lane on the shady side fast asleep, only a very little
further on than where the Baby was. They were very ragged, and
their snores did have a sinister sound.

'I expect they stole the titled heir at dead of night, and they've
been travelling hot-foot ever since, so now they're sleeping the
sleep of exhaustedness,' Alice said. 'What a heart-rending scene
when the patrician mother wakes in the morning and finds the infant
aristocrat isn't in bed with his mamma.'

The Baby was fast asleep or else the girls would have kissed it.
They are strangely fond of kissing. The author never could see
anything in it himself.

'If the gipsies DID steal it,' Dora said 'perhaps they'd sell it to
us. I wonder what they'd take for it.'

'What could you do with it if you'd got it?' H. O. asked.

'Why, adopt it, of course,' Dora said. 'I've often thought I
should enjoy adopting a baby. It would be a golden deed, too.
We've hardly got any in the book yet.'

'I should have thought there were enough of us,' Dicky said.

'Ah, but you're none of you babies,' said Dora.

'Unless you count H. O. as a baby: he behaves jolly like one
sometimes.'

This was because of what had happened that morning when Dicky found
H. O. going fishing with a box of worms, and the box was the one
Dicky keeps his silver studs in, and the medal he got at school,
and what is left of his watch and chain. The box is lined with red
velvet and it was not nice afterwards. And then H. O. said Dicky
had hurt him, and he was a beastly bully, and he cried. We thought
all this had been made up, and were sorry to see it threaten to
break out again. So Oswald said--

'Oh, bother the Baby! Come along, do!'

And the others came.

We were going to the miller's with a message about some flour that
hadn't come, and about a sack of sharps for the pigs.

After you go down the lane you come to a clover-field, and then a
cornfield, and then another lane, and then it is the mill. It is
a jolly fine mill: in fact it is two--water and wind ones--one of
each kind--with a house and farm buildings as well. I never saw a
mill like it, and I don't believe you have either.

If we had been in a story-book the miller's wife would have taken
us into the neat sanded kitchen where the old oak settle was black
with time and rubbing, and dusted chairs for us--old brown Windsor
chairs--and given us each a glass of sweet- scented cowslip wine
and a thick slice of rich home-made cake. And there would have
been fresh roses in an old china bowl on the table. As it was, she
asked us all into the parlour and gave us Eiffel Tower lemonade and
Marie biscuits. The chairs in her parlour were 'bent wood', and no
flowers, except some wax ones under a glass shade, but she was very
kind, and we were very much obliged to her. We got out to the
miller, though, as soon as we could; only Dora and Daisy stayed
with her, and she talked to them about her lodgers and about her
relations in London.

The miller is a MAN. He showed us all over the mills--both
kinds--and let us go right up into the very top of the wind-mill,
and showed us how the top moved round so that the sails could catch
the wind, and the great heaps of corn, some red and some yellow
(the red is English wheat), and the heaps slice down a little bit
at a time into a square hole and go down to the mill-stones. The
corn makes a rustling soft noise that is very jolly--something like
the noise of the sea--and you can hear it through all the other
mill noises.

Then the miller let us go all over the water-mill. It is fairy
palaces inside a mill. Everything is powdered over white, like
sugar on pancakes when you are allowed to help yourself. And he
opened a door and showed us the great water-wheel working on slow
and sure, like some great, round, dripping giant, Noel said, and
then he asked us if we fished.

'Yes,' was our immediate reply.

'Then why not try the mill-pool?' he said, and we replied politely;
and when he was gone to tell his man something we owned to each
other that he was a trump.

He did the thing thoroughly. He took us out and cut us ash
saplings for rods; he found us in lines and hooks, and several
different sorts of bait, including a handsome handful of
meal-worms, which Oswald put loose in his pocket.

When it came to bait, Alice said she was going home with Dora and
Daisy. Girls are strange, mysterious, silly things. Alice always
enjoys a rat hunt until the rat is caught, but she hates fishing
from beginning to end. We boys have got to like it. We don't feel
now as we did when we turned off the water and stopped the
competition of the competing anglers. We had a grand day's fishing
that day. I can't think what made the miller so kind to us.
Perhaps he felt a thrill of fellow-feeling in his manly breast for
his fellow-sportsmen, for he was a noble fisherman himself.

We had glorious sport--eight roach, six dace, three eels, seven
perch, and a young pike, but he was so very young the miller asked
us to put him back, and of course we did. 'He'll live to bite
another day,' said the miller.

The miller's wife gave us bread and cheese and more Eiffel Tower
lemonade, and we went home at last, a little damp, but full of
successful ambition, with our fish on a string.

It had been a strikingly good time--one of those times that happen
in the country quite by themselves. Country people are much more
friendly than town people. I suppose they don't have to spread
their friendly feelings out over so many persons, so it's thicker,
like a pound of butter on one loaf is thicker than on a dozen.
Friendliness in the country is not scrape, like it is in London.
Even Dicky and H. O. forgot the affair of honour that had taken
place in the morning. H. O. changed rods with Dicky because H.
O.'s was the best rod, and Dicky baited H. O.'s hook for him, just
like loving, unselfish brothers in Sunday School magazines.

We were talking fishlikely as we went along down the lane and
through the cornfield and the cloverfield, and then we came to the
other lane where we had seen the Baby. The tramps were gone, and
the perambulator was gone, and, of course, the Baby was gone too.

'I wonder if those gipsies HAD stolen the Baby?' Noel said
dreamily. He had not fished much, but he had made a piece of
poetry. It was this:


'How I wish
I was a fish.
I would not look
At your hook,
But lie still and be cool
At the bottom of the pool
And when you went to look
At your cruel hook,
You would not find me there,
So there!'


'If they did steal the Baby,' Noel went on, 'they will be tracked
by the lordly perambulator. You can disguise a baby in rags and
walnut juice, but there isn't any disguise dark enough to conceal
a perambulator's person.'

'You might disguise it as a wheel-barrow,' said Dicky.

'Or cover it with leaves,' said H. O., 'like the robins.'

We told him to shut up and not gibber, but afterwards we had to own
that even a young brother may sometimes talk sense by accident.

For we took the short cut home from the lane--it begins with a
large gap in the hedge and the grass and weeds trodden down by the
hasty feet of persons who were late for church and in too great a
hurry to go round by the road. Our house is next to the church, as
I think I have said before, some time.

The short cut leads to a stile at the edge of a bit of wood (the
Parson's Shave, they call it, because it belongs to him). The wood
has not been shaved for some time, and it has grown out beyond the
stile and here, among the hazels and chestnuts and young dogwood
bushes, we saw something white. We felt it was our duty to
investigate, even if the white was only the under side of the tail
of a dead rabbit caught in a trap.

It was not--it was part of the perambulator. I forget whether I
said that the perambulator was enamelled white--not the kind of
enamelling you do at home with Aspinall's and the hairs of the
brush come out and it is gritty-looking, but smooth, like the
handles of ladies very best lace parasols. And whoever had
abandoned the helpless perambulator in that lonely spot had done
exactly as H. O. said, and covered it with leaves, only they were
green and some of them had dropped off.

The others were wild with excitement. Now or never, they thought,
was a chance to be real detectives. Oswald alone retained a calm
exterior. It was he who would not go straight to the police
station.

He said: 'Let's try and ferret out something for ourselves before
we tell the police. They always have a clue directly they hear
about the finding of the body. And besides, we might as well let
Alice be in anything there is going. And besides, we haven't had
our dinners yet.'

This argument of Oswald's was so strong and powerful--his arguments
are often that, as I daresay you have noticed--that the others
agreed. It was Oswald, too, who showed his artless brothers why
they had much better not take the deserted perambulator home with
them.

'The dead body, or whatever the clue is, is always left exactly as
it is found,' he said, 'till the police have seen it, and the
coroner, and the inquest, and the doctor, and the sorrowing
relations. Besides, suppose someone saw us with the beastly thing,
and thought we had stolen it; then they would say, "What have you
done with the Baby?" and then where should we be?' Oswald's
brothers could not answer this question, but once more Oswald's
native eloquence and far-seeing discerningness conquered.

'Anyway,' Dicky said, 'let's shove the derelict a little further
under cover.'

So we did.

Then we went on home. Dinner was ready and so were Alice and
Daisy, but Dora was not there.

'She's got a-- well, she's not coming to dinner anyway,' Alice said
when we asked. 'She can tell you herself afterwards what it is
she's got.'

Oswald thought it was headache, or pain in the temper, or in the
pinafore, so he said no more, but as soon as Mrs Pettigrew had
helped us and left the room he began the thrilling tale of the
forsaken perambulator. He told it with the greatest thrillingness
anyone could have, but Daisy and Alice seemed almost unmoved.
Alice said--

'Yes, very strange,' and things like that, but both the girls
seemed to be thinking of something else. They kept looking at each
other and trying not to laugh, so Oswald saw they had got some
silly secret and he said--

'Oh, all right! I don't care about telling you. I only thought
you'd like to be in it. It's going to be a really big thing, with
policemen in it, and perhaps a judge.'

'In what?' H. O. said; 'the perambulator?'

Daisy choked and then tried to drink, and spluttered and got
purple, and had to be thumped on the back. But Oswald was not
appeased. When Alice said, 'Do go on, Oswald. I'm sure we all
like it very much,' he said--

'Oh, no, thank you,' very politely. 'As it happens,' he went on,
'I'd just as soon go through with this thing without having any
girls in it.'

'In the perambulator?' said H. O. again.

'It's a man's job,' Oswald went on, without taking any notice of H.
O.

'Do you really think so,' said Alice, 'when there's a baby in it?'

'But there isn't,' said H. O., 'if you mean in the perambulator.'

'Blow you and your perambulator,' said Oswald, with gloomy
forbearance.

Alice kicked Oswald under the table and said--

'Don't be waxy, Oswald. Really and truly Daisy and I HAVE got a
secret, only it's Dora's secret, and she wants to tell you herself.
If it was mine or Daisy's we'd tell you this minute, wouldn't we,
Mouse?'

'This very second,' said the White Mouse.

And Oswald consented to take their apologies.

Then the pudding came in, and no more was said except asking for
things to be passed--sugar and water, and bread and things.

Then when the pudding was all gone, Alice said--

'Come on.'

And we came on. We did not want to be disagreeable, though really
we were keen on being detectives and sifting that perambulator to
the very dregs. But boys have to try to take an interest in their
sisters' secrets, however silly. This is part of being a good
brother.

Alice led us across the field where the sheep once fell into the
brook, and across the brook by the plank. At the other end of the
next field there was a sort of wooden house on wheels, that the
shepherd sleeps in at the time of year when lambs are being born,
so that he can see that they are not stolen by gipsies before the
owners have counted them.

To this hut Alice now led her kind brothers and Daisy's kind
brother.
'Dora is inside,' she said, 'with the Secret. We were afraid to
have it in the house in case it made a noise.'

The next moment the Secret was a secret no longer, for we all
beheld Dora, sitting on a sack on the floor of the hut, with the
Secret in her lap.

It was the High-born Babe!

Oswald was so overcome that he sat down suddenly, just like Betsy
Trotwood did in David Copperfield, which just shows what a true
author Dickens is.

Copyright (c) 2007. fullstories.net. All rights reserved.