The Red House. Эдит Несбит
left for you when you come back.” So we stood up solemnly and raised our glasses to my toast,
“Here's luck to the Red House!”
Then said Yolande,
“And to the Babes in the Wood!”
And to Chloe's toast, “Here's to the wicked uncle—I mean the fairy godmother,” we emptied the glasses.
Then Yolande said good-bye, and pinned her hat on to her bright hair. At the door she turned to say:
“By-the-way, you won't mind my asking you to keep my things aired, will you? The furniture-warehouse people always let them get mothy, and give the piano a cold in its head. You might hang up the pictures, if you don't mind the trouble; they've all got cords, and they keep better hung up, like meat or game, you know. And furniture keeps best when it's being used. You'll sit on my chairs now and then, for the sake of the absent, won't you? My settle would go awfully well with your gate-table, and my oak press would do in those ‘marble halls’ you were talking about. I must rush, or miss my train. Good-bye. I'll send the furniture down to-morrow.”
And she was gone.
Chloe turned to me with wide-open, sparkling eyes.
“Oh, Len, isn't she a darling? Just because she saw how our Bandboxful of furniture would rattle about in that big house like a peanut in a cocoanut shell, to lend us all hers! She is a darling.”
“She is,” I admitted, “and her hair is the real Venetian red. But you'll miss the furniture horribly when she takes it away.”
“Don't grumble,” said Chloe. “We shall have all her lovely things for months and months, and by the time she comes back we shall have made some money to buy things. I'm going to work like a nigger directly we get settled. And so must you. Oh, here are the men at last. Two hours late!”
“Perhaps it is as well,” I said. “Harriet is only just ready.”
Our fat-faced maid-servant, who had rigidly refused during the whole morning to assist us in the least, on the ground that she “had her packing to see to,” now descended the stairs, bearing her whole wardrobe in two brown-paper parcels and a tin hat-box.
“Come in, please,” said Chloe, to our remover. “You'd better take these oak boxes first. They're very heavy.”
“I wants chesties of drawerses,” said the man, hoarsely, “all the chesties of drawerses you've got, and the pianner. Come on, Bill.”
“Right you are, Charley,” was the response.
“We haven't a piano, here,” said Chloe, and Charley seemed at once to form the lowest opinion of us. He was a thick-set ruffian with a red and angry eye. He was one of the four helpers engaged by the green-grocer to “move” us. His clothes and those of his friends smelled strange and stuffy, as though they had been smeared with putty and mutton fat, and locked away for years in a cupboard full of pickled onions and yellow soap and mice. The clothes of the unskilled laborer always have this strange scent. It lingers about everything they touch in passing through a house, and after days its freshness is still unimpaired. But I never knew any scent so overpowering as that which clung to the clothes of Charley and his mates. They strayed loudly up the uncarpeted stairs, urgent in their insistence on “chesties of drawerses,” and Chloe would have followed them, but Harriet came forward with, “Please, 'm, could I speak to you for a moment?”
“Well?”
“Please, I should wish to leave at the end of my month. Mother says the place ain't fit for me. The 'ouse is too large and the work is too 'eavy.”
“But we're going into another house,” said Chloe, cheerfully.
“Mother don't 'old with movings,” resumed Harriet, “and she says the 'ouse is too large and the work too 'eavy.”
“Very well; you can go into the kitchen and wait till we're ready to start,” said Chloe, with dignity.
But when the fat-faced traitress had stumped away down the little passage, Chloe dragged me into the dismantled dining-room and flung her arms round my neck. This was not, I knew, affection. It was merely despair.
“She's a pig,” said my wife, with tears in her voice. “Her month's up in a week. She might have told us before. And I'm sure we've been kind to her. I gave her that green moreen petticoat, and some stockings and collars and things, only yesterday. And the petticoat was as good as new.”
“I'll have satisfaction for that outrage, at any rate. A moreen petticoat—and green, too!” I cried. “She must be a stranger to all the higher emotions of our fallen nature. Cheer up, my darling, we'll get another girl right enough—a better one.”
“We couldn't have a worse,” said she. “Oh, they've broken something. I heard it smash. I do hope it's not the Dresden vases.”
It was only our best looking-glass, the same in which I had rebelliously dared to shave. “Never mind,” I said. “They'll have to replace it, and Charley will be unlucky for seven years. That's one comfort.”
It was almost our only one. Reckless as a herd of pigs in mid-flight, yet slow as an army of lame snails, Charley and his confederates packed our Bandboxful of furniture into the dark van that smelled of matting and straw and quarter-day. They broke an “occasional” table, and the door of the corner cupboard, and they smashed on the door-step the great jar of pickled walnuts which my mother-in-law had told me would last us a year. But it was Harriet who, sulkily obeying my order to make herself useful, went to the top of the house to fetch two highly colored texts from the walls of her bed-room, and, returning, fell over the best toilet set, smashing the jug and the soap-dish lid! It was rather a nice set, too, dark green, that Yolande had brought from Italy, and, by us, here, totally irreplaceable. I sent Harriet into the back kitchen then.
“And don't you come out till we're ready to start,” I said.
When the last of our “sticks” had been dragged from the house, and the van had been half unpacked to recover my coat and hat, zealously hidden under the dining-room table in the van's centre, and when the forlorn party of chairs and bookcases had been removed from the pavement and once more envanned, we added Harriet, speechless with sulky displeasure, to the van-load; and as we watched them drive off, my heart, at least, was lighter.
We set up our bicycles ready, and blew up the tires. Then we went all over the little house, “to say good-bye to it,” my wife said. Her face was quite sad now. It was in that horrid little dressing-room that she slipped her hand into mine and said:
“I didn't think I should be sorry. But I am. Dear little Bandbox—we've been very happy here, haven't we? Oh, do say you think we shall be just as happy there. You do, don't you?”
A narrator cannot be expected to chronicle all his replies. My answer satisfied Chloe, anyhow, and she consented to dry her eyes on my handkerchief.
Then we took a last look round, and went out.
“Good-bye,” we said to our Bandbox, and wished it a happy future.
“I hope the next people who live in you will be kind to you,” said Chloe, “and keep you clean, and be very happy in you, poor, dear little house.”
We rode away, turning at the corner for one more last look at our Bandbox. Its bare windows blinked forlornly at us in the June sunlight like the eyes of a deserted orphan. We rode on in silence.
We passed our furniture about half a mile from the Bandbox. And we had been keeping our tempers for more than two hours in the spacious emptiness of the Red House before the rattle of harness and the scent of Charley's coat announced the arrival of the van.
Charley and his minions made a hollow pretence of putting the furniture in its place. They did put the bedsteads together, insecurely, and in the wrong rooms; and they set up “chesties of drawerses” against walls. The oak chests they carried to the attic, and the best steel fire-irons were discovered, weeks later, in the cellar. But almost everything—saucepans,