Harding’s Luck, E. Nesbit [summer reads .TXT] 📗

wake up⁠—to wake up to the old, hard, cruel life⁠—to poverty, dullness, lameness. There was no other thing to be done. He must wake up and keep his promise to Beale. But it was hard⁠—hard⁠—hard. The beautiful house, the beautiful garden, the games, the boat-building, the soft clothes, the kind people, the uplifting sense that he was Somebody⁠ ⁠… yet he must go. Yes, if he could he would.

The nurse had taken burning wood from the hearth and set it on a silver plate. Now she strewed something on the glowing embers.

“Lie straight and still,” she said, “and wish thyself where thou wast when thou leftest that dream.”

He did so. A thick, sweet smoke rose from the little fire in the silver plate, and the nurse was chanting something in a very low voice.

“Men die,
Man dies not.
Times fly,
Time flies not.”

That was all he heard, though he heard confusedly that there was more.

He seemed to sink deep into a soft sea of sleep, to be rocked on its tide, and then to be flung by its waves, roughly, suddenly, on some hard shore of awakening. He opened his eyes. He was in the little bare front room in New Cross. Tinkler and the white seal lay on the floor among white moonflower seeds confusedly scattered, and the gas lamp from the street shone through the dirty panes on the newspapers and sacking.

“What a dream!” said Dickie, shivering, and very sleepy. “Oh, what a dream!” He put Tinkler and the seal in one pocket, gathered up the moonseeds and put them in the other, drew the old newspapers over him and went to sleep.

The morning sun woke him.

“How odd,” said he, “to dream all that⁠—weeks and weeks, in just a little bit of one little night! If it had only been true!”

He jumped up, eager to start for Gravesend. Since he had wakened out of that wonderful dream on purpose to go to Gravesend, he might as well start at once. But his jump ended in a sickening sideways fall, and his head knocked against the wainscot.

“I had forgotten,” he said slowly. “I shouldn’t have thought any dream could have made me forget about my foot.”

For he had indeed forgotten it, had leaped up, eagerly, confidently, as a sound child leaps, and the lame foot had betrayed him, thrown him down.

He crawled across to where the crutch lay⁠—the old broom, cut down, that Lady Talbot had covered with black velvet for him.

“And now,” he said, “I must get to Gravesend.” He looked out of the window at the dismal, sordid street. “I wonder,” he said, “if Deptford was ever really like it was in my dream⁠—the gardens and the clean river and the fields?”

He got out of the house when no one was looking, and went off down the street.

“Clickety-clack” went the crutch on the dusty pavement.

His back ached; his lame foot hurt; his “good” leg was tired and stiff, and his heart, too, was very tired. About this time, in the dream he had chosen to awaken from, for the sake of Beale, a bowl of porridge would be smoking at the end of a long oak table, and a great carved chair be set for a little boy who was not there.

Dickie strode on manfully, but the pain in his back made him feel sick.

“I don’t know as I can do it,” he said.

Then he saw the three gold balls above the door of the friendly pawnbroker.

He looked, hesitated, shrugged his shoulders, and went in.

“Hullo!” said the pawnbroker, “here we are again. Want to pawn the rattle, eh?”

“No,” said Dickie, “but what’ll you give me on the seal you gave me?”

The pawnbroker stared, frowned, and burst out laughing.

“If you don’t beat all!” he said. “I give you a present, and you come to pledge it with me! You should have been one of our people! So you want to pledge the seal. Well, well!”

“I’d much rather not,” said Dickie seriously, “because I love it very much. But I must have my fare to Gravesend. My father’s there, waiting for me. And I don’t want to leave Tinkler behind.”

He showed the rattle.

“What’s the fare to Gravesend?”

“Don’t know. I thought you’d know. Will you give me the fare for the seal?”

The pawnbroker hesitated and looked hard at him. “No,” he said, “no. The seal’s not worth it. Not but what it’s a very good seal,” he added, “very good indeed.”

“See here,” said Dickie suddenly, “I know what honor is now, and the word of a gentleman. You will not let me pledge the seal with you. Then let me pledge my word⁠—my word of honor. Lend me the money to take me to Gravesend, and by the honor of a gentleman I will repay you within a month.”

The voice was firm; the accent, though strange, was not the accent of Deptford street boys. It was the accent of the boy who had had two tutors and a big garden, a place in the King’s water-party, and a knowledge of what it means to belong to a noble house.

The pawnbroker looked at him. With the unerring instinct of his race, he knew that this was not playacting, that there was something behind it⁠—something real. The sense of romance, of great things all about them transcending the ordinary things of life⁠—this in the Jews has survived centuries of torment, shame, cruelty, and oppression. This inherited sense of romance in the pawnbroker now leaped to answer Dickie’s appeal. (And I do hope I am not confusing you; stick to it; read it again if you don’t understand. What I mean is that the Jews always see the big beautiful things; they don’t just see that gray is made of black and white; they see how incredibly black black can be, and that there may be a whiteness transcending all the whitest dreams in the world.)

“You’re a rum little chap,” was what the pawnbroker said, “but I like your pluck. Every man’s got to