The Wouldbegoods. Nesbit Edith
detained by having to make an apple-pie bed for Dicky. Dicky came up after him to see what we was up to, and when he did see he buzzed a pillow at Oswald, and the fight began. The others, hearing the noise of battle from afar, hastened to the field of action, all except Dora, who couldn't, because of being laid up with her foot, and Daisy, because she is a little afraid of us still, when we are all together. She thinks we are rough. This comes of having only one brother.
Well, the fight was a very fine one. Alice backed me up, and Noël and H. O. backed Dicky, and Denny heaved a pillow or two; but he cannot shy straight, so I don't know which side he was on.
And just as the battle raged most fiercely, Mrs. Pettigrew came in and snatched the pillows away, and shook those of the warriors who were small enough for it. She was rough if you like. She also used language I should have thought she would be above. She said, "Drat you!" and "Drabbit you!" The last is a thing I have never heard said before. She said:
"There's no peace of your life with you children. Drat your antics! And that poor, dear, patient gentleman right underneath, with his headache and his handwriting: and you rampaging about over his head like young bull-calves. I wonder you haven't more sense, a great girl like you."
She said this to Alice, and Alice answered gently, as we are told to do:
"I really am awfully sorry; we forgot about the headache. Don't be cross, Mrs. Pettigrew; we didn't mean to; we didn't think."
"You never do," she said, and her voice, though grumpy, was no longer violent. "Why on earth you can't take yourselves off for the day I don't know."
We all said, "But may we?"
She said, "Of course you may. Now put on your boots and go for a good long walk. And I'll tell you what – I'll put you up a snack, and you can have an egg to your tea to make up for missing your dinner. Now don't go clattering about the stairs and passages, there's good children. See if you can't be quiet this once, and give the good gentleman a chance with his copying."
She went off. Her bark is worse than her bite. She does not understand anything about writing books, though. She thinks Albert's uncle copies things out of printed books, when he is really writing new ones. I wonder how she thinks printed books get made first of all. Many servants are like this.
She gave us the "snack" in a basket, and sixpence to buy milk with. She said any of the farms would let us have it, only most likely it would be skim. We thanked her politely, and she hurried us out of the front door as if we'd been chickens on a pansy bed.
(I did not know till after I had left the farm gate open, and the hens had got into the garden, that these feathered bipeds display a great partiality for the young buds of plants of the genus viola, to which they are extremely destructive. I was told that by the gardener. I looked it up in the gardening book afterwards to be sure he was right. You do learn a lot of things in the country.)
We went through the garden as far as the church, and then we rested a bit in the porch, and just looked into the basket to see what the "snack" was. It proved sausage rolls, and queen cakes, and a Lent pie in a round tin dish, and some hard-boiled eggs, and some apples. We all ate the apples at once, so as not to have to carry them about with us. The church-yard smells awfully good. It is the wild thyme that grows on the graves. This is another thing we did not know before we came into the country.
Then the door of the church tower was ajar, and we all went up; it had always been locked before when we had tried it.
We saw the ringer's loft where the ends of the bell-ropes hang down with long, furry handles to them like great caterpillars, some red, and some blue and white, but we did not pull them. And then we went up to where the bells are, very big and dusty among large dirty beams; and four windows with no glass, only shutters like Venetian blinds, but they won't pull up. There were heaps of straws and sticks on the window ledges. We think they were owls' nests, but we did not see any owls.
Then the tower stairs got very narrow and dark, and we went on up, and we came to a door and opened it suddenly, and it was like being hit in the face, the light was so sudden. And there we were on the top of the tower, which is flat, and people have cut their names on it, and a turret at one corner, and a low wall all round, up and down, like castle battlements. And we looked down and saw the roof of the church, and the leads, and the church-yard, and our garden, and the Moat House, and the farm, and Mrs. Simpkins's cottage, looking very small, and other farms looking like toy things out of boxes, and we saw cornfields and meadows and pastures. A pasture is not the same thing as a meadow, whatever you may think. And we saw the tops of trees and hedges, looking like the map of the United States, and villages, and a tower that did not look very far away standing by itself on the top of a hill.
Alice pointed to it, and said:
"What's that?"
"It's not a church," said Noël, "because there's no church-yard. Perhaps it's a tower of mystery that covers the entrance to a subterranean vault with treasure in it."
Dicky said, "Subterranean fiddlestick!" and "A water-works, more likely."
Alice thought perhaps it was a ruined castle, and the rest of its crumbling walls were concealed by ivy, the growth of years.
Oswald could not make his mind up what it was, so he said: "Let's go and see! We may as well go there as anywhere."
So we got down out of the church tower and dusted ourselves, and set out.
The Tower of Mystery showed quite plainly from the road, now that we knew where to look for it, because it was on the top of a hill. We began to walk. But the tower did not seem to get any nearer. And it was very hot.
So we sat down in a meadow where there was a stream in the ditch and ate the "snack." We drank the pure water from the brook out of our hands, because there was no farm to get milk at just there, and it was too much fag to look for one – and, besides, we thought we might as well save the sixpence.
Then we started again, and still the tower looked as far off as ever. Denny began to drag his feet, though he had brought a walking-stick which none of the rest of us had, and said:
"I wish a cart would come along. We might get a lift."
He knew all about getting lifts, of course, from having been in the country before. He is not quite the white mouse we took him for at first. Of course when you live in Lewisham or Blackheath you learn other things. If you asked for a lift in Lewisham, High Street, your only reply would be jeers. We sat down on a heap of stones, and decided that we would ask for a lift from the next cart, whichever way it was going. It was while we were waiting that Oswald found out about plantain seeds being good to eat.
When the sound of wheels came we remarked with joy that the cart was going towards the Tower of Mystery. It was a cart a man was going to fetch a pig home in. Denny said:
"I say, you might give us a lift. Will you?"
The man who was going for the pig said:
"What, all that little lot?" but he winked at Alice, and we saw that he meant to aid us on our way. So we climbed up, and he whipped up the horse and asked us where we were going. He was a kindly old man, with a face like a walnut shell, and white hair and beard like a jack-in-the-box.
"We want to get to the tower," Alice said. "Is it a ruin, or not?"
"It ain't no ruin," the man said; "no fear of that! The man wot built it he left so much a year to be spent on repairing of it! Money that might have put bread in honest folks' mouths."
We asked was it a church then, or not.
"Church?" he said. "Not it. It's more of a tombstone, from all I can make out. They do say there was a curse on him that built it, and he wasn't to rest in earth or sea. So he's buried half-way up the tower – if you can call it buried."
"Can you go up it?" Oswald asked.
"Lord love you! yes; a fine view from the top, they say. I've never been up myself, though I've lived in sight of it, boy and man, these sixty-three years come harvest."
Alice asked whether you had to go past the dead and buried person to get to the top of the tower, and could you see the coffin.
"No,