Complete Works of Lewis Carroll (66 page)

‘What’s the matter now?’
I said.
‘Is your ankle worse?’

‘And it’ll get worse, and worse and worse,’ Bruno solemnly assured him, ‘till oo gives up those apples!’

Apparently the thief was convinced of this at last, and he sulkily began emptying his pockets of the apples.
The children watched from a little distance, Bruno dancing with delight at every fresh yell extracted from Nero’s terrified prisoner.

‘That’s all,’ the boy said at last.

‘It isn’t all!’
cried Bruno.
‘There’s three more in that pocket!’

Another hint from Sylvie to the Dog-King—another sharp yell from the thief, now convicted of lying also—and the remaining three apples were surrendered.

‘Let him go, please,’ Sylvie said in Doggee, and the lad limped away at a great pace, stooping now and then to rub the ailing ankle in fear, seemingly, that the ‘crahmp’ might attack it again.

Bruno ran back, with his booty, to the orchard wall, and pitched the apples over it one by one.
‘I’s welly afraid some of them’s gone under the wrong trees!’
he panted, on overtaking us again.

‘The wrong trees!’
laughed Sylvie.
‘Trees ca’n’t do wrong!
There’s no such things as wrong trees!’

‘Then there’s no such things as right trees neither!’
cried Bruno.
And Sylvie gave up the point.

‘Wait a minute, please!’
she said to me.
‘I must make Nero visible, you know!’

‘No, please don’t!’
cried Bruno, who had by this time mounted on the Royal back, and was twisting the Royal hair into a bridle.
‘It’ll be such fun to have him like this!’

‘Well, it does look funny,’ Sylvie admitted, and led the way to the farmhouse, where the farmer’s wife stood, evidently much perplexed at the weird procession now approaching her.
‘It’s summat gone wrong wi’ my spectacles, I doubt!’
she murmured, as she took them off, and began diligently rubbing them with a corner of her apron.

Meanwhile Sylvie had hastily pulled Bruno down from his steed, and had just time to make His Majesty wholly visible before the spectacles were resumed.

All was natural, now; but the good woman still looked a little uneasy about it.
‘My eyesight’s getting bad,’ she said, ‘but I see you now, my darlings!
You’ll give me a kiss, won’t you?’

Bruno got behind me in a moment: however Sylvie put up her face, to be kissed, as representative of both, and we all went in together.

CHAPTER FIVE

MATILDA JANE

‘COME to me, my little gentleman,’ said our hostess, lifting Bruno into her lap, ‘and tell me everything.’

‘I ca’n’t,’ said Bruno.
‘There wouldn’t be time.
Besides, I don’t know everything.’

The good woman looked a little puzzled, and turned to Sylvie for help.
‘Does he like riding?’
she asked.

‘Yes, I think so,’ Sylvie gently replied.
‘He’s just had a ride on Nero.’

‘Ah, Nero’s a grand dog, isn’t he?
Were you ever outside a horse, my little man?’

‘Always!’
Bruno said with great decision.
‘Never was inside one.
Was oo?’

Here I thought it well to interpose, and to mention the business on which we had come, and so relieved her, for a few minutes, from Bruno’s perplexing questions.

‘And those dear children will like a bit of cake, I’ll warrant!’
said the farmer’s hospitable wife, when the business was concluded, as she opened her cupboard, and brought out a cake.
‘And don’t you waste the crust, little gentleman!’
she added, as she handed a good slice of it to Bruno.
‘You know what the poetry-book says about wilful waste?’

‘No, I don’t,’ said Bruno.
‘What doos he say about it?’

‘Tell him, Bessie!’
And the mother looked down, proudly and lovingly, on a rosy little maiden, who had just crept shyly into the room, and was leaning against her knee.
‘What’s that your poetry-book says about wilful waste?’

‘For wilful waste makes woeful want,’ Bessie recited, in an almost inaudible whisper: ‘and you may live to say "How much I wish I had the crust that then I threw away!"‘

‘Now try if you can say it, my dear!
For wilful—’

‘For wifful—sumfinoruvver—’ Bruno began, readily enough; and then there came a dead pause.
‘Ca’n’t remember no more!’

‘Well, what do you learn from it, then?
You can tell us that, at any rate?’

Bruno ate a little more cake, and considered: but the moral did not seem to him to be a very obvious one.

‘Always to—’ Sylvie prompted him in a whisper.

‘Always to—’ Bruno softly repeated: and then, with sudden inspiration, ‘always to look where it goes to!’

‘Where what goes to, darling?’

‘Why the crust, a course!’
said Bruno.
‘Then, if I lived to say ‘How much I wiss I had the crust—" (and all that), I’d know where I frew it to!’

This new interpretation quite puzzled the good woman.
She returned to the subject of ‘Bessie’.
‘Wouldn’t you like to see Bessie’s doll, my dears!
Bessie, take the little lady and gentleman to see Matilda Jane!’

Bessie’s shyness thawed away in a moment.
‘Matilda Jane has just woke up,’ she stated, confidentially, to Sylvie.
‘Won’t you help me on with her frock?
Them strings is such a bother to tie!’

‘I can tie strings,’ we heard, in Sylvie’s gentle voice, as the two little girls left the room together.
Bruno ignored the whole proceeding, and strolled to the window, quite with the air of a fashionable gentleman.
Little girls, and dolls, were not at all his line.

And forthwith the fond mother proceeded to tell me (as what mother is not ready to do?) of all Bessie’s virtues (and vices too, for the matter of that) and of the many fearful maladies which, notwithstanding those ruddy cheeks and that plump little figure, had nearly, time and again, swept her from the face of the earth.

When the full stream of loving memories had nearly run itself out, I began to question her about the working men of that neighbourhood, and specially the ‘Willie’, whom we had heard of at his cottage.
‘He was a good fellow once,’ said my kind hostess: ‘but it’s the drink has ruined him!
Not that I’d rob them of the drink—it’s good for the most of them—but there’s some as is too weak to stand agin’ temptations: it’s a thousand pities, for them, as they ever built the Golden Lion at the corner there!’

‘The Golden Lion?’
I repeated.

‘It’s the new Public,’ my hostess explained.
‘And it stands right in the way, and handy for the workmen, as they come back from the brickfields, as it might be to-day, with their week’s wages.
A deal of money gets wasted that way.
And some of’em gets drunk.’

‘If only they could have it in their own houses—’ I mused, hardly knowing I had said the words out loud.

‘That’s it!’
she eagerly exclaimed.
It was evidently a solution, of the problem, that she had already thought out.
‘If only you could manage, so’s each man to have his own little barrel in his own house—there’d hardly be a drunken man in the length and breadth of the land!’

And then I told her the old story—about a certain cottager who bought himself a little barrel of beer, and installed his wife as bar-keeper: and how, every time he wanted his mug of beer, he regularly paid her over the counter for it: and how she never would let him go on ‘tick’, and was a perfectly inflexible bar-keeper in never letting him have more than his proper allowance:

and how, every time the barrel needed refilling, she had plenty to do it with, and something over for her money-box: and how, at the end of the year, he not only found himself in first-rate health and spirits, with that undefinable but quite unmistakable air which always distinguishes the sober man from the one who takes ‘a drop too much’, but had quite a box full of money, all saved out of his own pence!

‘If only they’d all do like that!’
said the good woman, wiping her eyes, which were overflowing with kindly sympathy.
‘Drink hadn’t need to be the curse it is to some—’

‘Only a curse,’ I said, ‘when it is used wrongly.
Any of God’s gifts may be turned into a curse, unless we use it wisely.
But we must be getting home.
Would you call the little girls?
Matilda Jane has seen enough of company, for one day, I’m sure!’

‘I’ll find ‘em in a minute,’ said my hostess, as she rose to leave the room.
‘Maybe that young gentleman saw which way they went?’

‘Where are they, Bruno?’
I said.

‘They ain’t in the field,’ was Bruno’s rather evasive reply, ‘‘cause there’s nothing but pigs there, and Sylvie isn’t a pig.
Now don’t interrupt me any more, ‘cause I’m telling a story to this fly; and it wo’n’t attend!’

‘They’re among the apples, I’ll warrant ‘em!’
said the Farmer’s wife.
So we left Bruno to finish his story, and went out into the orchard, where we soon came upon the children, walking sedately side by side, Sylvie carrying the doll, while little Bess carefully shaded its face, with a large cabbage-leaf for a parasol.

As soon as they caught sight of us, little Bess dropped her cabbage-leaf and came running to meet us, Sylvie following more slowly, as her precious charge evidently needed great care and attention.

‘I’m its Mamma, and Sylvie’s the Head-Nurse,’ Bessie explained: ‘and Sylvie’s taught me ever such a pretty song, for me to sing to Matilda Jane!’

‘Let’s hear it once more, Sylvie,’ I said, delighted at getting the chance I had long wished for, of hearing her sing.
But Sylvie turned shy and frightened in a moment.

‘No, please not!’
she said, in an earnest ‘aside’ to me.
‘Bessie knows it quite perfect now.
Bessie can sing it!’

‘Aye, aye!
Let Bessie sing it!’
said the proud mother.
‘Bessie has a bonny voice of her own,’ (this again was an ‘aside’ to me)

‘though I say it as shouldn’t!’

Bessie was only too happy to accept the ‘encore’.
So the plump little Mamma sat down at our feet, with her hideous daughter reclining stiffly across her lap (it was one of a kind that wo’n’t sit down, under any amount of persuasion), and, with a face simply beaming with delight, began the lullaby, in a shout that ought to have frightened the poor baby into fits.
The Head-Nurse crouched down behind her, keeping herself respectfully in the background, with her hands on the shoulders of her little mistress, so as to be ready to act as Prompter, if required, and to supply ‘each gap in faithless memory void’.