The Wouldbegoods (20 page)

‘So I perceived,’ said the President, stroking his white beard and smiling most agreeably at us; ‘a harmless
joke, my dear! Youth’s the season for jesting. There’s no harm done – pray think no more about it. It’s very honourable of you to come and apologize, I’m sure.’

His brow began to wear the furrowed, anxious look of one who would fain be rid of his guests and get back to what he was doing before they interrupted him.

Alice said, ‘We didn’t come for that. It’s
much
worse. Those were two
real
true Roman jugs you took away; we put them there; they aren’t ours. We didn’t know they were real Roman. We wanted to sell the Antiquities – I mean Antiquaries – and we were sold ourselves.’

‘This is serious,’ said the gentleman. ‘I suppose you’d know the – the “jugs” if you saw them again?’

‘Anywhere,’ said Oswald, with the confidential rashness of one who does not know what he is talking about.

Mr Longchamps opened the door of a little room leading out of the one we were in, and beckoned us to follow. We found ourselves amid shelves and shelves of pottery of all sorts; and two whole shelves – small ones – were filled with the sort of jug we wanted.

‘Well,’ said the President, with a veiled menacing sort of smile, like a wicked cardinal, ‘which is it?’

Oswald said, ‘I don’t know.’

Alice said, ‘I should know if I had it in my hand.’

The President patiently took the jugs down one after another, and Alice tried to look inside them. And one after another she shook her head and gave them back. At last she said, ‘You didn’t
wash
them?’

Mr Longchamps shuddered and said ‘No’.

‘Then,’ said Alice, ‘there is something written with lead-pencil inside both the jugs. I wish I hadn’t. I would
rather you didn’t read it. I didn’t know it would be a nice old gentleman like you would find it. I thought it would be the younger gentleman with the thin legs and the narrow smile.’

‘Mr Turnbull.’ The President seemed to recognize the description unerringly. ‘Well, well – boys will be boys – girls, I mean. I won’t be angry. Look at all the “jugs” and see if you can find yours.’

Alice did – and the next one she looked at she said, ‘This is one’ – and two jugs further on she said, ‘This is the other.’

‘Well,’ the President said, ‘these are certainly the specimens which I obtained yesterday. If your uncle will call on me I will return them to him. But it’s a disappointment. Yes, I think you must let me look inside.’

He did. And at the first one he said nothing. At the second he laughed.

‘Well, well,’ he said, ‘we can’t expect old heads on young shoulders. You’re not the first who went forth to shear and returned shorn. Nor, it appears, am I. Next time you have a Sale of Antiquities, take care that you yourself are not “sold”. Good day to you, my dear. Don’t let the incident prey on your mind,’ he said to Alice. ‘Bless your heart, I was a boy once myself, unlikely as you may think it. Goodbye.’

We were in time to see the pigs bought after all.

I asked Alice what on earth it was she’d scribbled inside the beastly jugs, and she owned that just to make the lark complete she had written ‘Sucks’ in one of the jugs, and ‘Sold again, silly’, in the other.

But we know well enough who it was that was sold. And if ever we have any Antiquities to tea again, they shan’t find so much as a Greek waistcoat button if we can help it.

Unless it’s the President, for he did not behave at all badly. For a man of his age I think he behaved exceedingly well. Oswald can picture a very different scene having been enacted over those rotten pots if the President had been an otherwise sort of man.

But that picture is not pleasing, so Oswald will not distress you by drawing it for you. You can most likely do it easily for yourself.

chapter eleven

the benevolent bar

The tramp was very dusty about the feet and legs, and his clothes were very ragged and dirty, but he had cheerful twinkly grey eyes, and he touched his cap to the girls when he spoke to us, though a little as though he would rather not.

We were on the top of the big wall of the Roman ruin in the Three Tree pasture. We had just concluded a severe siege with bows and arrows – the ones that were given us to make up for the pistol that was confiscated after the sad but not sinful occasion when it shot a fox.

To avoid accidents that you would be sorry for afterwards, Oswald, in his thoughtfulness, had decreed that everyone was to wear wire masks.

Luckily there were plenty of these, because a man who lived in the Moat House once went to Rome, where they throw hundreds and thousands at each other in play, and call it a Comfit Battle or
Battaglia di Confetti
(that’s real Italian). And he wanted to get up that sort of thing among the village people – but they were too beastly slack, so he chucked it.

And in the attic were the wire masks he brought home with him from Rome, which people wear to prevent the nasty comfits getting in their mouths and eyes.

So we were all armed to the teeth with masks and arrows, but in attacking or defending a fort your real strength is not in your equipment, but in your power of Shove. Oswald, Alice, Noel and Denny defended the fort. We were much the strongest side, but that was how Dicky and Oswald picked up.

The others got in, it is true, but that was only because an arrow hit Dicky on the nose, and it bled quarts as usual, though hit only through the wire mask. Then he put into dock for repairs, and while the defending party weren’t looking he sneaked up the wall at the back and shoved Oswald off, and fell on top of him, so that the fort, now that it had lost its gallant young leader, the life and soul of the besieged party, was of course soon overpowered, and had to surrender.

Then we sat on the top and ate some peppermints Albert’s uncle brought us a bag of from Maidstone when he went to fetch away the Roman pottery we tried to sell the Antiquities with.

The battle was over, and peace raged among us as we sat in the sun on the big wall and looked at the fields, all blue and swimming in the heat.

We saw the tramp coming through the beetfield. He made a dusty blot on the fair scene.

When he saw us he came close to the wall, and touched his cap, as I have said, and remarked –

‘Excuse me interrupting of your sports, young gentlemen and ladies, but if you could so far oblige as to tell a labouring man the way to the nearest pub. It’s a dry day and no error.’

‘The Rose and Crown is the best pub,’ said Dicky, ‘and the landlady is a friend of ours. It’s about a mile if you go by the field path.’

‘Lor’ love a duck!’ said the tramp. ‘A mile’s a long way, and walking’s a dry job this ’ere weather.’ We said we agreed with him.

‘Upon my sacred,’ said the tramp, ‘if there was a pump handy I believe I’d take a turn at it – I would indeed, so help me if I wouldn’t! Though water always upsets me and makes my ’and shaky.’

We had not cared much about tramps since the adventure of the villainous sailor man and the Tower of Mystery, but we had the dogs on the wall with us (Lady was awfully difficult to get up, on account of her long deer-hound legs), and the position was a strong one, and easy to defend. Besides the tramp did not look like that bad sailor, nor talk like it. And we considerably outnumbered the tramp, anyway.

Alice nudged Oswald and said something about Sir Philip Sidney and the tramp’s need being greater than his, so Oswald was obliged to go to the hole in the top of the wall where we store provisions during sieges and get out the bottle of ginger beer which he had gone without when the others had theirs so as to drink it when he got really thirsty. Meanwhile Alice said –

‘We’ve got some ginger beer; my brother’s getting it. I hope you won’t mind drinking out of our glass. We can’t wash it, you know – unless we rinse it out with a little ginger beer.’

‘Don’t ye do it, miss,’ he said eagerly; ‘never waste good liquor on washing.’

The glass was beside us on the wall. Oswald filled it with ginger beer and handed down the foaming tankard to the tramp. He had to lie on his young stomach to do this.

The tramp was really quite polite – one of Nature’s gentlemen, and a man as well, we found out afterwards. He said –

‘Here’s to you!’ before he drank. Then he drained the glass till the rim rested on his nose.

‘Swelp me, but I
was
dry,’ he said. ‘Don’t seem to matter much what it is, this weather, do it? – so long as it’s suthink wet. Well, here’s thanking you.’

‘You’re very welcome,’ said Dora; ‘I’m glad you liked it.’

‘Like it?’ said he. ‘I don’t suppose you know what it’s like to have a thirst on you. Talk of free schools and free libraries, and free baths and wash-houses and such! Why don’t someone start free
drinks
? He’d be a ’ero, he would. I’d vote for him any day of the week and one over. Ef yer don’t objec I’ll set down a bit and put on a pipe.’

He sat down on the grass and began to smoke. We asked him questions about himself, and he told us many of his secret sorrows – especially about there being no work nowadays for an honest man. At last he dropped asleep in the middle of a story about a vestry he worked for that hadn’t acted fair and square by him like he had by them, or it (I don’t know if vestry is singular or plural), and we went home. But before we went we held a hurried council and collected what money we could from the little we had with us (it was ninepence-halfpenny), and
wrapped it in an old envelope Dicky had in his pocket and put it gently on the billowing middle of the poor tramp’s sleeping waistcoat, so that he would find it when he woke. None of the dogs said a single syllable while we were doing this, so we knew they believed him to be poor but honest, and we always find it safe to take their word for things like that.

As we went home a brooding silence fell upon us; we found out afterwards that those words of the poor tramp’s about free drinks had sunk deep in all our hearts, and rankled there.

After dinner we went out and sat with our feet in the stream. People tell you it makes your grub disagree with you to do this just after meals, but it never hurts us. There is a fallen willow across the stream that just seats the eight of us, only the ones at the end can’t get their feet into the water properly because of the bushes, so we keep changing places. We had got some liquorice root to chew. This helps thought. Dora broke a peaceful silence with this speech –

‘Free drinks.’

The words awoke a response in every breast.

‘I wonder someone doesn’t,’ H.O. said, leaning back till he nearly toppled in, and was only saved by Oswald and Alice at their own deadly peril.

‘Do for goodness’ sake sit still, H.O.,’ observed Alice. ‘It would be a glorious act! I wish
we
could.’

‘What, sit still?’ asked H.O.

‘No, my child,’ replied Oswald, ‘most of us can do that when we try. Your angel sister was only wishing to set up free drinks for the poor and thirsty.’

‘Not for all of them,’ Alice said, ‘just a few. Change places now, Dicky. My feet aren’t properly wet at all.’

It is very difficult to change places safely on the willow. The changers have to crawl over the laps of the others, while the rest sit tight and hold on for all they’re worth. But the hard task was accomplished and then Alice went on –

‘And we couldn’t do it for always, only a day or two – just while our money held out. Eiffel Tower lemonade’s the best, and you get a jolly lot of it for your money too. There must be a great many sincerely thirsty persons go along the Dover Road every day.’

‘It wouldn’t be bad. We’ve got a little chink between us,’ said Oswald.

‘And then think how the poor grateful creatures would linger and tell us about their inmost sorrows. It would be most frightfully interesting. We could write all their agonied life histories down afterwards like
All the Year Round
Christmas numbers. Oh, do let’s!’

Alice was wriggling so with earnestness that Dicky thumped her to make her calm.

‘We might do it, just for one day,’ Oswald said, ‘but it wouldn’t be much – only a drop in the ocean compared with the enormous dryness of all the people in the whole world. Still, every little helps, as the mermaid said when she cried into the sea.’

‘I know a piece of poetry about that,’ Denny said.

do something or other, I forget what, but it means the same as Oswald was saying about the mermaid.’

‘What are you going to call it?’ asked Noel, coming out of a dream.

‘Call what?’

‘The Free Drinks game.’

‘Oh, shut up!’ remarked Dicky. ‘You’ve been making that rot up all the time we’ve been talking instead of listening properly.’ Dicky hates poetry. I don’t mind it so very much myself, especially Macaulay’s and Kipling’s and Noel’s.

‘There was a lot more – “lame” and “dame” and “name” and “game” and things – and now I’ve forgotten it,’ Noel said in gloom.

‘Never mind,’ Alice answered, ‘it’ll come back to you in the silent watches of the night; you see if it doesn’t. But really, Noel’s right, it
ought
to have a name.’

‘Free Drinks Company.’

‘Thirsty Travellers’ Rest.’

‘The Travellers’ joy.’

These names were suggested, but not cared for extra.

Then someone said – I think it was Oswald – ‘Why not “The House Beautiful”?’

‘It can’t be a house, it must be in the road. It’ll only be a stall.’

‘The “Stall Beautiful” is simply silly,’ Oswald said.

‘The “Bar Beautiful” then,’ said Dicky, who knows what the ‘Rose and Crown’ bar is like inside, which of course is hidden from girls.

‘Oh, wait a minute,’ cried the Dentist, snapping his fingers like he always does when he is trying to remember things. ‘I thought of something, only Daisy tickled me and it’s gone – I know – let’s call it the Benevolent Bar!’

It was exactly right, and told the whole truth in two words. ‘Benevolent’ showed it was free and ‘Bar’ showed what was free; e.g. things to drink. The ‘Benevolent Bar’ it was.

We went home at once to prepare for the morrow, for of course we meant to do it the very next day. Procrastination is you know what – and delays are dangerous. If we had waited long we might have happened to spend our money on something else.

The utmost secrecy had to be observed, because Mrs Pettigrew hates tramps. Most people do who keep fowls. Albert’s uncle was in London till the next evening, so we could not consult him, but we know he is always chock full of intelligent sympathy with the poor and needy.

Acting with the deepest disguise, we made an awning to cover the Benevolent Bar keepers from the searching
rays of the monarch of the skies. We found some old striped sun-blinds in the attic, and the girls sewed them together. They were not very big when they were done, so we added the girls’ striped petticoats. I am sorry their petticoats turn up so constantly in my narrative, but they really are very useful, especially when the band is cut off. The girls borrowed Mrs Pettigrew’s sewing machine; they could not ask her leave without explanations, which we did not wish to give just then, and she had lent it to them before. They took it into the cellar to work it, so that she should not hear the noise and ask bothering questions.

They had to balance it on one end of the beer-stand. It was not easy. While they were doing the sewing we boys went out and got willow poles and chopped the twigs off, and got ready as well as we could to put up the awning.