The Bazaar and Other Stories (14 page)

 

“Do you think,” said Maria, “the brigands are still down there?”

 

But before they had time to wonder, they heard a step on the
gravel.

 

There was Perkins, a pink hyacinth in one hand, a bit of bass
⁸
in
the other, looking in at the door of the shed. When he saw the trapdoor open, he knew everything was discovered. He gave one awful
oath and bolted. Like a pair of greyhounds, Oliver and Maria went
after him.

 

“Police, police!” yelled Maria. But the police were looking for
clues in the kitchen and being given beer by the cook. They did not
hear; no one came out.

 

As they ran, Oliver pulled the pea-shooter out of his pocket;
Maria held the water-pistol ready to aim. Perkins dodged round the
house and doubled; panting and cursing he sprinted over the lawn.
His spectacles fell off. Like many other brigands, he was extremely
short-sighted; he went quite blind and rushed head-on into a tree.
He rebounded against the tree, but at this point Maria, with great
presence of mind, flung herself right on the ground just under his
feet; Perkins tripped over Maria and went crash down. At the same
time, Oliver let off the pea-shooter, picked up the water-pistol Maria
had dropped and fired this down Perkins’s neck. Maria crawled from
underneath Perkins and sat on his head. Oliver seized one of his legs
and, though Perkins lashed about, kicking wildly, Oliver tightly held
on. They all yelled. A great many people rushed out of the house,
and the police came after them.

 

The rest was quite simple. When the footmen-brigands saw that
all was discovered, they were too mean to come to Perkins’s rescue,
they rushed away through the house and across the drawbridge, but
the bloodhounds, which had just arrived in a van, were sent after
them. The gardener-brigands, who had left their guns in the cave,
locked themselves into a greenhouse, but were soon captured.
Perkins, tightly bound up with ropes and swearing horribly, was
taken by the policemen into the shed and forced, by having real
pistols held to his head, to lean down the hold and shout the
Brigands’ Countersign. Five or six brigands
had
been down in the
cave; when they heard the Countersign they stopped knocking
Uncle Arthur, the groom and the chauffeur about and rushed
faithfully up the ladder, thinking there was going to be a raid. The
police hit them on the head, one by one as they came up, and
arrested them. They were all very much surprised. The police were
only prevented from hitting Uncle Arthur over the head by the fact
that he came up shouting, waving the silver mug.

 

When the whole plot, and the awful wickedness of Perkins, had
been discovered, Uncle Arthur and Aunt Alice could not be grateful
enough to Oliver and Maria. They gave a large party in their
honour, at which all the gold plates were put out. They gave Maria
Priscilla’s pony which Priscilla was told she need not ride any more,
promised to send Maria to Switzerland for the summer holidays and
even offered to buy her a small island to live in when she was grown
up: Aunt Alice also gave her a pearl necklace to wear when she was
eighteen and went to balls. They gave Oliver a gun and a new
bicycle and promised him a car when he was eighteen; they also
opened an account for him at Fortnum and Mason’s, so that he could
order whatever food he liked to take back to school. They gave
them both silver mugs with inscriptions, like Uncle Arthur’s. Even
Priscilla thanked them, and the thought of what she had escaped
made her quite thin.

 

After this, Aunt Alice would have nothing but lady gardeners; she
also gave up footmen and had nice parlour-maids. They dismissed
the French governess, because they did not like to keep anyone who
was even related to brigands. Aunt Alice persuaded Uncle Arthur to
have machine-guns mounted on all the turrets, but these were not
needed, as life in the castle remained quite peaceful after this.

 

The evening before they went back to school, Oliver and Maria
had a party all to themselves in the brigands’ cave and danced round
each other with torches.
The Unromantic Princess
W
hen the Princess was born the Queen, who knew
what was usual, invited two Fairy Godmothers to her christening.
Unfortunately, they arrived in a workaday mood, and full of modern
ideas about girls. So that the gifts they gave the Princess were as
follows: one gave her Punctuality; the other, Commonsense. This
had not been the Queen’s idea at all, and she was grievously dis
appointed. Besides being so dull, the two Fairy Godmothers were a
nuisance throughout the christening party. They would not sit down
to lunch, but moved about restlessly, nibbling moth-wing sand
wiches out of their reticules. They cast a gloom on the party, where
all the other guests were in gold, silver or mother o’ pearl brocade,
with their severe poke bonnets
¹
tied under their chins and sensible
boots that had tramped miles in Fairyland. Their motto was: “one
should never fly when one could walk.” They gave the guests several
quite unasked-for home truths, and everyone found them tiresome
old bodies. Everyone blamed the Queen for not being more
exclusive. She felt wretched, and stole away to her baby’s cradle.
“My poor darling, you
shall
be lovely,” she said. The Princess gurgled
and blinked, but did not look quite happy.

At the ceremony, the Princess had been christened Angelica. She
had a whole string of other names, but they did not count; she was

called
Princess Angelica – this had seemed to the Queen a safe name:
if she grew up beautiful it would suit her beautifully; if she were
simply good it should do as well. After the christening, the poor
Queen began to watch her daughter anxiously. “When I have
another baby, I shall pointedly
not
ask those wretched Fairies,” she
said. But she had no other baby, so Princess Angelica grew very
important. Before she could walk, her terrible Punctuality began to
make itself felt throughout the palace. If anyone were late anywhere
she would yell: as for her Commonsense, it was impossible to
appease her with rattles or fluffy jumping toys.

Unhappily for the Princess, these two gifts she had been given
did not take up the whole of her character. She had a soft heart, was
dreamy and loved beautiful things. When her Commonsense eye
drove her mother away from her cradle, she would be found
weeping because her mother had gone. The third time she ever
walked, she tottered up to a mirror, and the royal nurse saw her
taking a good look at herself. But what she saw in the mirror made
her crinkle her face up. She was a fine baby, chubby and rosy, a
model to all the baby girls in the land. But what the poor Princess
had been looking for had been curls.

Her hair never would curl. It was soft and fine, but nothing would
make it anything but straight. The first time she drove out in the
royal coach with the Queen, all the mothers in the crowd nudged
their pretty, curly children and said: “You learn to be good, like
Princess Angelica!” The Princess heard, and tears rolled down her
face. “There,” said the mothers, “she’s crying because you are so
naughty!” The first two inventions to be called after her were

The
Princess Angelica Alarm Clock
, and
The Princess Angelica Children’s Self-Help
Guild
. The Queen’s heart bled for her poor little girl.

When the Princess was seven the Queen died of a fever, and the
King became very melancholy and old. He relied more and more on
Princess Angelica’s advice, and used to talk to her about matters of
state. He used to send for her to sit with him in the evenings, so that
she often sat up far too late. Punctuality told her this was long after
bed-time, and Commonsense that she would be pasty and crossfeeling next day. But she sat patiently on in her black frock, doing
what she could for her beautiful mother’s sake.

The Princess read geography, history and natural history to
satisfy her Commonsense. But to please her dreamy side she read
fairy tales. She read fairy tales, but these were very discouraging.
They were nearly always about princesses of dazzling beauty, who
though shut up in towers, transformed into cats or swooped off with
by dragons were always rescued by a beautiful Third Son. The Third
Son always turned out to be somebody they could marry, but they
fell in love as soon as their eyes met. He had generally loved her
first, or heard of her dazzling beauty, though, disguised as a miller,
a bear or a minstrel, he had had no opportunity of speaking to her.
The Princess saw that it should be very romantic to be a Princess at
all. But then she went back to look at her own face in the mirror: a
nice little good snub face, edged with straight brown hair. “Will
anyone marry me?” she said to her nurse one day. “Oh, yes, indeed,”
said her nurse, “someone will have to. And much honoured they’ll
be.”

When the year of mourning for the Queen’s death was over, the
King thought he would give a party to cheer up the Princess. He
asked all the children of all the important people, and kindly had
galleries built round the walls of the royal garden so that the
children of unimportant people could come and look on. The day
was very fine: the sun shone, the birds sang, the fountains flung
rainbows into the air, even the royal goldfish swam more merrily in
the marble-edged pools. The rose-trees had been kept for a week
under large glass shades, so as to bring all the roses out at once.
Princess Angelica, in a white satin dress, stood by the centre foun
tain receiving her guests. A small pearl crown was fastened with
tight elastic underneath her slippery brown hair. All the children of
the important people were very proper and shy: they shook hands,
curtsied, then stood round in a circle staring at her. Yes, the scene
was gay, but the party was not.

²
As this was the Princess’s first party,
she did not realise how dull it was being till she looked up at the
galleries and saw the merry faces of the unimportant children, who
were having a good deal of fun, licking ice-cream out of cones and
pointing at what they saw in a rude but natural way. She noticed,
particularly, one little boy with red curls, in a yellow shirt. He had
finished not only his own cone of ice-cream but one he had pinched
from the little boy on his right: now he was leaning his elbows on
the rail of the gallery and looking down in a serious, dreamy way.
He looked about twelve. The Princess thought at once: “He must be
a Third Son.”

But, oh dear! Down here, the important children danced a
quadrille rather creakily on the lawn.

³
Then they played catch with
hollow golden balls. When the Princess missed a catch, which she
did once or twice from nervousness, they murmured “Too bad.”
They were so much afraid of not doing everything up to time that
they had all borrowed their mother’s or father’s wrist-watches, which
they kept looking at. They were all so afraid of saying something
not sensible that they could not speak at all. The Princess’s heart
sank. She
saw
this was very dull, and felt all the children up there
must be pitying her. She did not know that they only saw the
fountains, the roses and the flashing gold balls, heard the loud tunes
the band played with great pleasure and envied the Princess’s pearl
crown and quilted satin dress. She glanced up again and again at the
proud, dreamy, red-haired boy with his elbow sticking out through
a hole in his shirt. “He
knows
he is in disguise,” thought Princess
Angelica.

Suddenly, the important children all gaped. The Princess, who
had been holding a golden ball in her hands, stopped, smiled up,
and suddenly threw the ball at a gallery. The red-haired boy,
unfolding his arms in a flash, caught the ball with one hand. All the
children in the galleries shot up with excitement. The boy held the
ball, looking down at the garden and smiling. Then he threw it
back. But not, oh, not to the Princess! He threw it to one important
little girl whose long flaxen curls bobbed beautifully on her emerald
velvet dress. The Princess’s heart broke. She pushed her crown back,
pretending not to notice. She thought: “I have behaved with abso
lute commonsense. If one recognises a Third Son in disguise, one
should do something about him. I was quite right.”

The important girl with flaxen curls missed the ball disdainfully
and let it roll on to an important boy.

 

But the palace guards, who had been watching the galleries
carefully to see the unimportant children did not misbehave, noticed
the incident. What the red-haired boy had done was a shocking
breach of manners. To have a gold ball thrown to you by a princess
is an honour: you should throw it back to
her
, having first bowed
three times. To throw the ball to anyone else is treason. The captain
of the guard said: “He has insulted the Princess.” So the guard went
quietly round the gallery and arrested the red-haired boy. The
Princess saw him being dragged out. Soon after, the trumpets
sounded for tea.

 

Next day the red-haired boy was brought for trial into the palace
courtyard. The King said he was sorry but the Princess would have
to be there. He would have been glad to have let the matter drop,
but all the courtiers were furious and kept him up to it. The flaxenhaired important little girl had to be there as a witness. The poor
Princess could not fail to be up to time: as it happened the King’s
procession was late, so she sat on her small throne looking round the
empty court till the trumpets sounded and the procession appeared:
the prisoner was then brought in by another door. The flaxen-haired
girl looked down her nose disdainfully.
⁴
The boy with the red curls
looked scornful, indifferent. Standing between his two guards he
gazed round at the courtyard and all the people in it: his eyes once
met the Princess’s without a flicker.