The Wouldbegoods (22 page)

But it
was
warm certainly, and it was some time since we’d gone so far in boots. Yet when H.O. complained we did our duty as pilgrims and made him shut up. He did as soon as Alice said that about whining and grizzling being below the dignity of a Manciple.

It was so warm that the Prioress and the wife of Bath gave up walking with their arms round each other in their usual silly way (Albert’s uncle calls it Laura Matildaing), and the Doctor and Mr Bath had to take their jackets off and carry them.

I am sure if an artist or a photographer, or any person who liked pilgrims, had seen us he would have been very pleased. The paper cockleshells were first-rate, but it was awkward having them on the top of the staffs, because they got in your way when you wanted the staff to use as a walking-stick.

We stepped out like a man all of us, and kept it up as well as we could in book-talk, and at first all was merry as a dinner-bell; but presently Oswald, who was the ‘very perfect gentle knight’, could not help noticing that one of us was growing very silent and rather pale, like people are when they have eaten something that disagrees with them before they are quite sure of the fell truth.

So he said, ‘What’s up, Dentist, old man?’ quite kindly and like a perfect knight, though, of course, he was
annoyed with Denny. It is sickening when people turn pale in the middle of a game and everything is spoiled, and you have to go home, and tell the spoiler how sorry you are that he is knocked up, and pretend not to mind about the game being spoiled.

Denny said, ‘Nothing’, but Oswald knew better.

Then Alice said, ‘Let’s rest a bit, Oswald, it
is
hot.’

‘Sir Oswald, if you please, Plain Pilgrim,’ returned her brother dignifiedly. ‘Remember I’m a knight.’

So then we sat down and had lunch, and Denny looked better. We played adverbs, and twenty questions, and apprenticing your son, for a bit in the shade, and then Dicky said it was time to set sail if we meant to make the port of Canterbury that night. Of course, pilgrims reck not of ports, but Dicky never does play the game thoughtfully.

We went on. I believe we should have got to Canterbury all right and quite early, only Denny got paler and paler, and presently Oswald saw, beyond any doubt, that he was beginning to walk lame.

‘Shoes hurt you, Dentist?’ he said, still with kind striving cheerfulness.

‘Not much – it’s all right,’ returned the other.

So on we went – but we were all a bit tired now – and the sun was hotter and hotter; the clouds had gone away. We had to begin to sing to keep up our spirits. We sang ‘The British Grenadiers’ and ‘John Brown’s Body’, which is grand to march to, and a lot of others. We were just starting on ‘Tramp, tramp, tramp, the boys are marching’, when Denny stopped short. He stood first on one foot and then on the other, and suddenly
screwed up his face and put his knuckles in his eyes and sat down on a heap of stones by the roadside. When we pulled his hands down he was actually crying. The author does not wish to say it is babyish to cry.

‘Whatever is up?’ we all asked, and Daisy and Dora petted him to get him to say, but he only went on howling, and said it was nothing, only would we go on and leave him, and call for him as we came back.

Oswald thought very likely something had given Denny the stomach ache, and he did not like to say so before all of us, so he sent the others away and told them to walk on a bit.

Then he said, ‘Now, Denny, don’t be a young ass. What is it? Is it stomach ache?’

And Denny stopped crying to say ‘No!’ as loud as he could.

‘Well, then,’ Oswald said, ‘look here, you’re spoiling the whole thing. Don’t be a jackape, Denny. What is it?’

‘You won’t tell the others if I tell you?’

‘Not if you say not,’ Oswald answered in kindly tones.

‘Well, it’s my shoes.’

‘Take them off, man.’

‘You won’t laugh?’

‘
No
!’ cried Oswald, so impatiently that the others looked back to see why he was shouting. He waved them away, and with humble gentleness began to undo the black-tape sandals.

Denny let him, crying hard all the time.

When Oswald had got off the first shoe the mystery was made plain to him.

‘Well! Of all the –’ he said in proper indignation.

Denny quailed – though he said he did not – but then he doesn’t know what quailing is, and if Denny did not quail then Oswald does not know what quailing is either.

For when Oswald took the shoe off he naturally chucked it down and gave it a kick, and a lot of little pinky yellow things rolled out. And Oswald looked closer at the interesting sight. And the little things were
split
peas.

‘Perhaps you’ll tell me,’ said the gentle knight, with the politeness of despair, ‘why on earth you’ve played the goat like this?’

‘Oh, don’t be angry,’ Denny said; and now his shoes were off, he curled and uncurled his toes and stopped crying. ‘I
knew
pilgrims put peas in their shoes – and – oh, I wish you wouldn’t laugh!’

‘I’m not,’ said Oswald, still with bitter politeness.

‘I didn’t want to tell you I was going to, because I wanted to be better than all of you, and I thought if you knew I was going to you’d want to too, and you wouldn’t when I said it first. So I just put some peas in my pocket and dropped one or two at a time into my shoes when you weren’t looking.’

In his secret heart Oswald said, ‘Greedy young ass.’ For it
is
greedy to want to have more of anything than other people, even goodness.

Outwardly Oswald said nothing.

‘You see’ – Denny went on – ‘I do want to be good. And if pilgriming is to do you good, you ought to do it properly. I shouldn’t mind being hurt in my feet if it would make me good for ever and ever. And besides, I wanted to play the game thoroughly. You always say I don’t.’

The breast of the kind Oswald was touched by these last words.

‘I think you’re quite good enough,’ he said. ‘I’ll fetch back the others – no, they won’t laugh.’

And we all went back to Denny, and the girls made a fuss with him. But Oswald and Dicky were grave and stood aloof. They were old enough to see that being good was all very well, but after all you had to get the boy home somehow.

When they said this, as agreeably as they could, Denny said –

‘It’s all right – someone will give me a lift.’

‘You think everything in the world can be put right with a lift,’ Dicky said, and he did not speak lovingly.

‘So it can,’ said Denny, ‘when it’s your feet. I shall easily get a lift home.’

‘Not here you won’t,’ said Alice. ‘No one goes down this road; but the high road’s just round the corner, where you see the telegraph wires.’

Dicky and Oswald made a sedan chair and carried Denny to the high road, and we sat down in a ditch to wait. For a long time nothing went by but a brewer’s dray. We hailed it, of course, but the man was so sound asleep that our hails were vain, and none of us thought soon enough about springing like a flash to the horses’ heads, though we all thought of it directly the dray was out of sight.

So we had to keep on sitting there by the dusty road, and more than one pilgrim was heard to say it wished we had never come. Oswald was not one of those who uttered this useless wish.

At last, just when despair was beginning to eat into the vital parts of even Oswald, there was a quick tap-tapping of horses’ feet on the road, and a dogcart came in sight with a lady in it all alone.

We hailed her like the desperate shipwrecked mariners in the long-boat hail the passing sail.

She pulled up. She was not a very old lady – twenty-five we found out afterwards her age was –and she looked jolly.

‘Well,’ she said, ‘what’s the matter?’

‘It’s this poor little boy,’ Dora said, pointing to the Dentist, who had gone to sleep in the dry ditch, with his mouth open as usual. ‘His feet hurt him so, and will you give him a lift?’

‘But why are you all rigged out like this?’ asked the lady, looking at our cockleshells and sandals and things. We told her.

‘And how has he hurt his feet?’ she asked. And we told her that.

She looked very kind. ‘Poor little chap,’ she said. ‘Where do you want to go?’

We told her that too. We had no concealments from this lady.

‘Well,’ she said, ‘I have to go on to – what is its name?’

‘Canterbury,’ said H.O.

‘Well, yes, Canterbury,’ she said; ‘it’s only about half a mile. I’ll take the poor little pilgrim – and, yes, the three girls. You boys must walk. Then we’ll have tea and see the sights, and I’ll drive you home – at least some of you. How will that do?’

We thanked her very much indeed, and said it would do very nicely.

Then we helped Denny into the cart, and the girls got up, and the red wheels of the cart spun away through the dust.

‘I wish it had been an omnibus the lady was driving,’ said H.O., ‘then we could all have had a ride.’

‘Don’t you be so discontented,’ Dicky said. And Noel said –

‘You ought to be jolly thankful you haven’t got to carry Denny all the way home on your back. You’d have had to if you’d been out alone with him.’

When we got to Canterbury it was much smaller than we expected, and the cathedral not much bigger than the Church that is next to the Moat House. There seemed to be only one big street, but we supposed the rest of the city was hidden away somewhere. There was a large inn, with a green before it, and the red-wheeled dogcart was standing in the stableyard and the lady, with Denny and the others, sitting on the benches in the porch, looking out for us. The inn was called the ‘George and Dragon’, and it made me think of the days when there were coaches and highwaymen and footpads and jolly landlords, and adventures at country inns, like you read about.

‘We’ve ordered tea,’ said the lady. ‘Would you like to wash your hands?’

We saw that she wished us to, so we said yes, we would. The girls and Denny were already much cleaner than when we parted from them.

There was a courtyard to the inn and a wooden staircase outside the house. We were taken up this, and washed our hands in a big room with a four-post
wooden bed and dark red hangings – just the sort of hangings that would not show the stains of gore in the dear old adventurous times.

Then we had tea in a great big room with wooden chairs and tables, very polished and old.

It was a very nice tea, with lettuces, and cold meat, and three kinds of jam, as well as cake, and new bread, which we are not allowed at home.

While tea was being had, the lady talked to us. She was very kind.

There are two sorts of people in the world, besides others; one sort understand what you’re driving at, and the other don’t. This lady was the one sort.

After everyone had had as much to eat as they could possibly want, the lady said, ‘What was it you particularly wanted to see at Canterbury?’

‘The cathedral,’ Alice said, ‘and the place where Thomas à Becket was murdered.’

‘And the Danejohn,’ said Dicky.

Oswald wanted to see the walls, because he likes the Story of St Alphege and the Danes.

‘Well, well,’ said the lady, and she put on her hat; it was a really sensible one – not a blob of fluffy stuff and feathers put on sideways and stuck on with long pins, and no shade to your face, but almost as big as ours, with a big brim and red flowers, and black strings to tie under your chin to keep it from blowing off.

Then we went out all together to see Canterbury. Dicky and Oswald took it in turns to carry Denny on their backs. The lady called him ‘The Wounded Comrade’.

We went first to the church. Oswald, whose quick brain was easily aroused to suspicions, was afraid the lady might begin talking in the church, but she did not. The church door was open. I remember Mother telling us once it was right and good for churches to be left open all day, so that tired people could go in and be quiet, and say their prayers, if they wanted to. But it does not seem respectful to talk out loud in church. (See Note A.)

When we got outside the lady said, ‘You can imagine how on the chancel steps began the mad struggle in which Becket, after hurling one of his assailants, armour and all, to the ground –’

‘It would have been much cleverer,’ H.O. interrupted, ‘to hurl him without his armour, and leave that standing up.’

‘Go on,’ said Alice and Oswald, when they had given H.O. a withering glance. And the lady did go on. She told us all about Becket, and then about St Alphege, who had bones thrown at him till he died, because he wouldn’t tax his poor people to please the beastly rotten Danes.

And Denny recited a piece of poetry he knows called ‘The Ballad of Canterbury’.

It begins about Danish warships snake-shaped, and ends about doing as you’d be done by. It is long, but it has all the beef-bones in it, and all about St Alphege.

Then the lady showed us the Danejohn, and it was like an oast house. And Canterbury walls that Alphege defied the Danes from looked down on a quite common farmyard. The hospital was like a barn, and other
things were like other things, but we went all about and enjoyed it very much. The lady was quite amusing, besides sometimes talking like a real cathedral guide I met afterwards. (See Note B.) When at last we said we thought Canterbury was very small considering, the lady said –

‘Well, it seemed a pity to come so far and not at least hear something about Canterbury.’

And then at once we knew the worst, and Alice said –

‘What a horrid sell!’ But Oswald, with immediate courteousness, said –

‘I don’t care. You did it awfully well.’ And he did not say, though he owns he thought of it –

‘I knew it all the time,’ though it was a great temptation. Because really it was more than half true. He had felt from the first that this was too small for Canterbury. (See Note C.)

The real name of the place was Hazelbridge, and not Canterbury at all. We went to Canterbury another time. (See Note D.) We were not angry with the lady for selling us about it being Canterbury, because she had really kept it up first-rate. And she asked us if we minded, very handsomely, and we said we liked it. But now we did not care how soon we got home. The lady saw this, and said –