Edith Nesbit - Oswald Bastable and Others

We had a comfortable feast at the kitchen table, standing up to eat, like horses.

Then we had to let Noël read us his piece of poetry about the soldier; he wouldn't have slept if we hadn't. It was very long, and it began as I have said, and ended up:

Noël owned that Hooray sounded too cheerful for the end of a poem about soldiers with faces like theirs were.

'But I didn't mean it about the soldiers. It was about the King and Country. Half a sec. I'll put that in.' So he wrote:

'You can't sing Hooray,' said Dicky. So Noël went to bed singing it, which was better than arguing about it, Alice said. But it was noisier as well.

Oswald and Dicky always went round the house to see that all the doors were bolted and the shutters up. This is what the head of the house always does, and Oswald is the head when father is not there. There are no shutters upstairs, only curtains. The White House, which is Miss Sandal's house's name, is not in the village, but 'quite a step' from it, as Mrs. Beale says. It is the first house you come to as you come along the road from the marsh.

We used to look in the cupboard and under the beds for burglars every night. The girls liked us to, though they wouldn't look themselves, and I don't know that it was much good. If there is a burglar, it's sometimes safer for you not to know it. Where ignorance is bliss, 'tis folly to find a burglar, especially as he would be armed to the teeth as likely as not. However, there is not much worth being a burglar about, in houses where the motto is plain living and high thinking, and there never was anyone in the cupboards or under the beds.

Then we put out all the lights very carefully in case of fire – all except Noël's. He does not like the dark. He says there are things in it that go away when you light a candle, and however much you talk reason and science to him, it makes no difference at all.

Then we got into our pyjamas. It was Oswald who asked father to let us have pyjamas instead of nightgowns; they are so convenient for dressing up when you wish to act clowns, or West Indian planters, or any loose-clothed characters. Then we got into bed, and then we got into sleep.

Little did the unconscious sleepers reck of the strange destiny that was advancing on them by leaps and bounds through the silent watches of the night.

Although we were asleep, the rain went on raining just the same, and the wind blowing across the marsh with the fury of a maniac who has been transformed into a blacksmith's bellows. And through the night, and the wind, and the rain, our dreadful destiny drew nearer and nearer. I wish this to sound as if something was going to happen, and I hope it does. I hope the reader's heart is now standing still with apprehensionness on our account, but I do not want it to stop altogether, so I will tell you that we were not all going to be murdered in our beds, or pass peacefully away in our sleeps with angel-like smiles on our young and beautiful faces. Not at all. What really happened was this. Some time must have elapsed between our closing our eyes in serene slumber and the following narrative:

Oswald was awakened by Dicky thumping him hard in the back, and saying in accents of terror – at least, he says not, but Oswald knows what they sounded like:

'What's that?'

Oswald reared up on his elbow and listened, but there was nothing to listen to except Dicky breathing like a grampus, and the giggle-guggle of the rain-water overflowing from the tub under the window.

'What's what?' said Oswald.

He did not speak furiously, as many elder brothers would have done when suddenly awakened by thumps.

' That! ' said Dicky. 'There it is again!'

And this time, certainly, there it was, and it sounded like somebody hammering on the front-door with his fists. There is no knocker to the plain-living, high-thinking house.

Oswald controlled his fears, if he had any (I am not going to say whether he had or hadn't), and struck a match. Before the candle had had time to settle its flame after the first flare up that doesn't last, the row began again.

Oswald's nerves are of iron, but it would have given anybody a start to see two white figures in the doorway, yet so it was. They proved to be Alice and Dora in their nighties; but no one could blame anyone for not being sure of this at first.

'Is it burglars?' said Dora; and her teeth did chatter, whatever she may say.

' I think it's Mrs. Beale,' said Alice. 'I expect she's forgotten the key.'

Oswald pulled his watch out from under his pillow.

'It's half-past one,' he said.

And then the knocking began again. So the intrepid Oswald went to the landing window that is over the front-door. The others went too. And he opened the window in his pyjamas and said, 'Who's there?'

There was the scraping sound of boots on the doorstep, as somebody down there stepped back.

'Is this the way to Ashford?' said the voice of a man.

'Ashford's thirteen miles off,' said Oswald. 'You get on to the Dover road.'

'I don't want to get on the Dover road,' said the voice; 'I've had enough of Dover.'

A thrill ran through every heart. We all told each other so afterwards.

'Well,' said Dicky, 'Ashford's thirteen miles – '

'Anybody but you in the house?'

'Say we've got men and dogs and guns,' whispered Dora.

'There are six of us,' said Oswald, 'all armed to the teeth.'

The stranger laughed.

'I'm not a burglar,' he said; 'I've lost my way, that's all. I thought I should have got to Ashford before dusk, but I missed the way. I've been wandering all over these marshes ever since, in the rain. I expect they're out after me now, but I'm dead beat. I can't go on. Won't you let me in? I can sit by the kitchen fire.'

Oswald drew his head back through the window, and a hasty council took place on the landing.

'It is ,' said Alice.

'You heard what he said about Dover, and their being out after him?'

'I say, you might let a chap in,' said the voice outside. 'I'm perfectly respectable. Upon my word I am.'

'I wish he hadn't said that,' whispered Dora. [** ']Such a dreadful story! And we didn't even ask him if he was.'

'He sounds very tired,' said Alice.

'And wet,' said Oswald. 'I heard the water squelching in his boots.'

'What'll happen if we don't let him in?' said Dicky.

'He'll be caught and taken back, like the soldiers,' said Oswald. 'Look here, I'm going to chance it. You others can lock yourselves into your rooms if you're frightened.'

Then Oswald put his brave young head out of the window, and the rain dripped on to the back of his bold young neck off the roof, like a watering-pot on to a beautiful flower, and he said:

'There's a porch to the side door. Just scoot round there and shelter, and I'll come down in half a sec.'

A resolve made in early youth never to face midnight encounters without boots was the cause of this delay. Oswald and Dicky got into their boots and jackets, and told the girls to go back to bed.

Then we went down and opened the front-door. The stranger had heard the bolts go, and he was outside waiting.

We held the door open politely, and he stepped in and began at once to drip heavily on the doormat.

We shut the door. He looked wildly round.

'Be calm! You are safe,' said Oswald.

'Thanks,' said the stranger; 'I see I am.'

All our hearts were full of pity for the outcast. He was, indeed, a spectacle to shock the benevolent. Even the prison people, Oswald thought, or the man he took the cake from, would have felt their fierceness fade if they could have seen him then. He was not in prison dress. Oswald would have rather liked to see that, but he remembered that it was safer for the man that he had found means to rid himself of the felon's garb. He wore a gray knickerbocker suit, covered with mud. The lining of his hat must have been blue, and it had run down his face in streaks like the gentleman in Mr. Kipling's story. He was wetter than I have ever seen anyone out of a bath or the sea.