The Wouldbegoods: Being the Further Adventures of the Treasure Seekers, E. Nesbit [red novels .TXT] 📗

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And after dinner it got worse and worse.

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

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

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

‘This is jolly nice, isn’t it?’

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

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

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

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

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