Five Children and It, E. Nesbit [good summer reads TXT] 📗

will deal with the case. Send the afflicted ones to a home, as likely as not, and the boys to a reformatory. Now then, come along, youngsters! No use making a fuss. You bring the gells along, Mr. Peasemarsh, sir, and I’ll shepherd the boys.”

Speechless with rage and horror, the four children were driven along the streets of Rochester. Tears of anger and shame blinded them, so that when Robert ran right into a passerby he did not recognise her till a well-known voice said, “Well, if ever I did! Oh, Master Robert, whatever have you been a-doing of now?” And another voice, quite as well known, said, “Panty; want go own Panty!”

They had run into Martha and the Baby!

Martha behaved admirably. She refused to believe a word of the policeman’s story, or of Mr. Peasemarsh’s either, even when they made Robert turn out his pockets in an archway and show the guineas.

“I don’t see nothing,” she said. “You’ve gone out of your senses, you two! There ain’t any gold there⁠—only the poor child’s hands, all over crock and dirt, and like the very chimbley. Oh that I should ever see the day!”

And the children thought this very noble of Martha, even if rather wicked, till they remembered how the Fairy had promised that the servants should never notice any of the fairy gifts. So of course Martha couldn’t see the gold, and so was only speaking the truth, and that was quite right, of course, but not extra noble.

It was getting dusk when they reached the police-station. The policeman told his tale to an inspector, who sat in a large bare room with a thing like a clumsy nursery-fender at one end to put prisoners in. Robert wondered whether it was a cell or a dock.

“Produce the coins, officer,” said the inspector.

“Turn out your pockets,” said the constable.

Cyril desperately plunged his hands in his pockets, stood still a moment, and then began to laugh⁠—an odd sort of laugh that hurt, and that felt much more like crying. His pockets were empty. So were the pockets of the others. For of course at sunset all the fairy gold had vanished away.

“Turn out your pockets, and stop that noise,” said the inspector.

Cyril turned out his pockets, every one of the nine which enriched his Norfolk suit. And every pocket was empty.

“Well!” said the inspector.

“I don’t know how they done it⁠—artful little beggars! They walked in front of me the ’ole way, so as for me to keep my eye on them and not to attract a crowd and obstruct the traffic.”

“It’s very remarkable,” said the inspector, frowning.

“If you’ve quite done a-browbeating of the innocent children,” said Martha, “I’ll hire a private carriage and we’ll drive home to their papa’s mansion. You’ll hear about this again, young man!⁠—I told you they hadn’t got any gold, when you were pretending to see it in their poor helpless hands. It’s early in the day for a constable on duty not to be able to trust his own eyes. As to the other one, the less said the better; he keeps the Saracen’s Head, and he knows best what his liquor’s like.”

“Take them away, for goodness’ sake,” said the inspector crossly. But as they left the police-station he said, “Now then!” to the policeman and Mr. Peasemarsh, and he said it twenty times as crossly as he had spoken to Martha.

Martha was as good as her word. She took them home in a very grand carriage, because the carrier’s cart was gone, and, though she had stood by them so nobly with the police, she was so angry with them as soon as they were alone for “trapseing into Rochester by themselves,” that none of them dared to mention the old man with the pony-cart from the village who was waiting for them in Rochester. And so, after one day of boundless wealth, the children found themselves sent to bed in deep disgrace, and only enriched by two pairs of cotton gloves, dirty inside because of the state of the hands they had been put on to cover, an imitation crocodile-skin purse, and twelve penny buns, long since digested.

The thing that troubled them most was the fear that the old gentleman’s guinea might have disappeared at sunset with all the rest, so they went down to the village next day to apologise for not meeting him in Rochester, and to see. They found him very friendly. The guinea had not disappeared, and he had bored a hole in it and hung it on his watch-chain. As for the guinea the baker took, the children felt they could not care whether it had vanished or not, which was not perhaps very honest, but on the other hand was not wholly unnatural. But afterwards this preyed on Anthea’s mind, and at last she secretly sent twelve stamps by post to “Mr. Beale, Baker, Rochester.” Inside she wrote, “To pay for the buns.” I hope the guinea did disappear, for that pastrycook was really not at all a nice man, and, besides, penny buns are seven for sixpence in all really respectable shops.

III Being Wanted

The morning after the children had been the possessors of boundless wealth, and had been unable to buy anything really useful or enjoyable with it, except two pairs of cotton gloves, twelve penny buns, an imitation crocodile-skin purse, and a ride in a pony-cart, they awoke without any of the enthusiastic happiness which they had felt on the previous day when they remembered how they had had the luck to find a Psammead, or Sand-fairy, and to receive its promise to grant them a new wish every day. For now they had had two wishes, Beauty and Wealth, and neither had exactly made them happy. But the happening of strange things, even if they are not completely pleasant things, is more amusing than those times when nothing happens but meals, and they are not always completely pleasant, especially on the days when