The House of Arden · Chapter 8 (1/3)

VIII

Guy Fawkes

Three days, because there had been a quarrel. But days pass quickly when the sun shines, and it is holiday-time, and you have a big ruined castle to explore and examine⁠—a castle that is your own, or your brother’s.

“After all,” said Elfrida sensibly, “we might quite likely find the treasure ourselves, without any magic Mouldiwarpiness at all. We’ll look thoroughly. We won’t leave a stone unturned.”

“We shall have to leave a good many stones unturned,” said Edred, looking at the great grey mass of the keep that towered tall and frowning above them.

“Well, you know what I mean,” said Elfrida. “Come on!” and they went.

They climbed the steep, worn stairs that wound round and round in the darkness⁠—stairs littered with dead leaves and mould and dropped feathers, and the dry, deserted nests of owls and jackdaws; stairs that ended suddenly in daylight and a steep last step, and the top of a broad ivy-grown wall from which you could look down, down, down; past the holes in the walls where the big beams used to be, past the old fireplaces still black with the smoke of fires long since burnt out, past the doors and windows of rooms whose floors fell away long ago; down, down, to where ferns and grass and brambles grew green at the very bottom of the tower.

Then there were arched doors that led to colonnades with strong little pillars and narrow windows, wonderful little unexpected chambers and corners⁠—the best place in the whole wide world for serious and energetic hide-and-seek.

“How glorious,” said Elfrida, as they rested, scarlet and panting, after a thrilling game of “I spy,”⁠—“if all these broken bits were mended, so that you couldn’t see where the new bits were stuck on! And if it could all be exactly like it was when it was brand-new.”

“There wasn’t the house when it was brand-new⁠—the house like it is now, I mean,” said Edred. “I don’t suppose there was any attic with chests in when the castle was new.”

“There couldn’t be, not with all the chests,” said Elfrida; “of course not, because some of the clothes in the chest weren’t made till long after the castle was built. I believe grownups can tell what a broken thing was like when it was new. I know they can with bones⁠—mastodons and things. And they made out what Hercules was like out of one foot of him that they found, I believe,” she added hazily.

“I’ve got an idea,” said Edred, “if we could get back to where the castle was all perfect like a model and draw pictures of every part. Then when we found the treasure we should know exactly what to build it up like, shouldn’t we?”

“Yes,” said Elfrida very gently. “We certainly should. But then we should have to know how to draw first, shouldn’t we?”

“Of course we should,” Edred agreed, “but that wouldn’t take long if we really tried. I never do try at school. I don’t like it. But it’s jolly easy. I know that. Burslem mi. always takes the drawing prize, and you know what a duffer he is. We might begin to learn now, don’t you think?”

Elfrida sat down on a fallen stone in the middle of the castle yard, and looked at the intricate wonderful arches and pillars, the crenulated battlements of the towers, the splendid stoutness of the walls, and she sighed.

“Yes,” she said, “let’s begin now⁠—”

“And you’ll have to lend me one of your pencils,” said he, “because I broke mine all to bits trying to get the parlour door open the day you’d got the key in your pocket. Quite a long one it was. You’ll have to lend me a long one, Elf. I can’t draw with those little endy-bits that get inside your hand and prick you with the other end.”

“I don’t mind,” said she, “so long as you don’t put it in your mouth.”

So they got large sheets of writing-paper, and brown calf-bound books for the paper to lie flat on, and they started to draw Arden Castle. And as Elfrida tried to draw everything she knew was there, as well as everything she could see, her drawing soon became almost entirely covered with black-lead.

They had no indiarubber, and if you drew anything wrong it had to stay drawn. When you first begin to draw, you draw a good many things wrong, don’t you? I assure you that nobody would have known that the black and grey muddle on Elfrida’s paper was meant to be a picture of a castle. Edred’s was much more easily recognised, even before he printed “Arden Castle” under it in large, uneven letters. He never once raised his eyes from his paper, and just drew what he thought the front of the castle looked like from the outside. Also he sucked his pencil earnestly⁠—Elfrida’s pencil, I mean⁠—and this made the lines of his drawing very black.

“There!” he said at last, “it’s ever so much liker than yours.”

“Yes,” said Elfrida, “but there’s more in mine.”

“It doesn’t matter how much there is in a picture if you can’t tell what it’s meant for,” said Edred, with some truth. “Now, in mine you can see the towers, and the big gate, and the windows, and the twiddly in-and-outness on top.”

“Yes,” said Elfrida, “but⁠ ⁠… well, let’s do something else. I don’t believe we should either of us learn to draw well enough to rebuild Arden by; not before we’ve found the treasure, I mean. Perhaps we might meet a real artist, like the one we saw drawing the castle yesterday⁠—in the past I mean⁠—and get him to draw it for us, and bring the picture back with us, and⁠—”

“Oh,” cried Edred, jumping up and dropping his masterpiece, and the calf-bound volume and the pencil. “I know. The Brownie!”

“The Brownie?”

“Yes⁠—take it with us. Then we could photograph the castle all perfect.”

“But we can’t take it with us.”

“Can’t we?” said Edred; “that’s all you know. Now I’ll tell you something. That first time⁠—a bit of plaster was in my shoe when we changed, and it was in my shoe when we got there, and I took it out when we were learning about ‘dog’s delight.’ And I flipped it out of the window. And when we got back, and I’d changed and everything, there was that bit of plaster in my own shoe. If we can take plaster we can take photographs⁠—cameras, I mean.” This close and intelligent reasoning commanded Elfrida’s respect, and she wished she had thought of it herself. But then she had not had any plaster in her shoe. So she said⁠—

“You’re getting quite clever, aren’t you?”

“Aha,” said Edred, “you’d like to have thought of that yourself, wouldn’t you? I can be clever sometimes, same as you can.”

It is very annoying to have our thoughts read. Elfrida said swiftly, “Not often you can’t,” and then stopped short. For a moment the children stood looking at each other with a very peculiar expression. Then a sigh of relief broke from each.

“Fielded!” said Edred.

“Just in time!” said Elfrida. “It wasn’t a quarrel; nobody could say it was a quarrel. Come on, let’s go and look at the cottages, like the witch told us to.”

They went. They made a tour of inspection that day and the next and the next. And they saw a great many things that a grown-up inspector would never have seen. Poor people are very friendly and kind to you when you are a child. They will let you come into their houses and talk to you and show you things in a way that they would never condescend to do with your grown-up relations. This is, of course, if you are a really nice child, and treat them in a respectful and friendly way. Edred and Elfrida very soon knew more about the insides of the cottages round Arden than any grownup could have learned in a year. They knew what wages the master of the house got, what there was for dinner, and what, oftener, there wasn’t, how many children were still living, and how many had failed to live. They knew exactly where the rain came through the rotten thatch in bad weather, and where the boards didn’t fit and so let the draughts in, and how some of the doors wouldn’t shut, some wouldn’t open, and how the bedroom windows were, as often as not, not made to open at all.

And when they weren’t visiting the cottages or exploring the castle they found a joyous way of passing the time in the reading aloud of the history of Arden. They took it in turns to read aloud. Elfrida looked carefully for some mention of Sir Edward Talbot and his pretending to be the Chevalier St. George. There was none, but a Sir Edward Talbot had been accused, with the Lord Arden of the time, of plotting against His Most Christian Majesty King James I.

“I wonder if he was like my Edward Talbot?” said Elfrida. “I would like to see him again. I wish I’d told him about us having been born so many years after he died. But it would have been difficult to explain, wouldn’t it? Let’s look in Green’s History Book and see what they looked like when it was His Most Christian Majesty King James the First.”

Perhaps it was this which decided the children, when the three days were over, to put on the clothes which most resembled the ones in the pictures of James I’s time in Green’s History.

Edred had full breeches, puffed out like balloons, and a steeple-crowned hat, and a sort of tunic of crimson velvet, and a big starched ruff round his little neck more uncomfortable even than your Eton collar is after you’ve been wearing flannels for days and days. And Elfrida had long, tight stays with a large, flat-shaped piece of wood down the front, and very full, long skirts over a very abrupt hoop.

When the three days were over the door of the attic, which, as usual after a quarrel, had been quite invisible and impossible to find, had become as plain as the nose on the face of the plainest person you know, and the children had walked in, and looked in the chests till they found what they wanted.

And now they put on ruffs and all the rest of it to the accompaniment, or, as it always seemed, with the help, of soft pigeon noises.

While they were dressing Elfrida held the Brownie camera tightly, in one hand or the other. This made dressing rather slow and difficult, but the children had agreed that if it were not done the Brownie would be, as Edred put it, “liable to vanish,” as everything else belonging to their own time always did⁠—except their clothes. I can’t explain to you just now how it was that their clothes didn’t vanish. It would take too long. But it was all part of the magic of white feathers which are, as you know, the clothes of white pigeons.

And now a very odd thing happened. As Edred put on his second shoe⁠—which was the last touch to their united toilets⁠—the walls seemed to tremble and shake and go crooked, like a house of cards at the very instant before it topples down. The floor slanted to that degree that standing on it was so difficult as to be at last impossible. The rafters all seemed to get crooked and mixed, like a box of matches when you spill them on the floor. The tiled roof that showed blue daylight through seemed to spin like a top, and you could not tell at all which way up you were. All this happened with dreadful suddenness, but almost as soon as it had begun it stopped with a jerk like that of a clockwork engine that has gone wrong. And the attic was gone⁠—and the chests, and the blue-chinked tiles of the roof, and the walls and the rafters. And the room had shrunk to less than half its old size. And it was higher, and it was not an attic any more, but a round room with narrow windows, and just such a fireplace, with a stone hood, as the ones the children had seen when they looked down from the tops of the towers. You must have often heard of events that take people’s breath away. This sudden change did really take away the breaths of Edred and Elfrida, so that for a few moments they could only stare at each other “like Guy Fawkes masks,” as Elfrida later said.

“I see,” said Edred, when breath enough for speech had returned to him. “This is the place where the attic was after the tower fell to pieces.”

“But there isn’t any attic really,” said Elfrida. “You know we can’t find it if we quarrelled, and Mrs. Honeysett doesn’t ever find it. It isn’t anywhere.”

“Yes, it is,” said Edred. “We couldn’t find it if it wasn’t.”

“Well,” said Elfrida gloomily, “I only hope we may find it, that’s all. I suppose we may as well go out. It’s no use sticking in this horrid little room.” Her hand was on the door, but even as she fumbled with the latch, which was of iron and of a shape to which she was wholly unaccustomed, something else happened, even more disconcerting than the turnover-change in which the attic and the chests had disappeared. It is very difficult to describe. Perhaps you happen to dislike travelling in trains with your back to the engine? If you do dislike it, you dislike it very much indeed. It makes your head ache, and gives you a queer feeling at the back of your neck, and makes you turn so pale that the grown-up people with whom you are travelling will ask you what is the matter, and sometimes heartlessly insist that the buns you had at the junction, or the chocolate creams pressed into your hand at the parting hour by Uncle Fred or Aunt Imogen, are the cause of your sufferings. The worst feeling of all is that terrible sensation, as though your heart and lungs and the front part of your waistcoat were being drawn slowly but surely through your backbone, and taken a very long way off.

The sensations which now held Edred and Elfrida were exactly like those which⁠—if you don’t like travelling backwards⁠—you know only too well⁠—and the sensations were so acute that both children shut their eyes. The whirling feeling, and the withdrawing-waistcoat feeling, and the headache, and the back-of-the-neck feeling stopped as suddenly as they had begun, and the two children opened their eyes in a room which Edred at least had never seen before. To Elfrida it seemed strange yet familiar. The shape of the room, the position of doors and windows, the mantelpiece with its curious carvings⁠—these she knew. And some of the furniture, too. Yet the room seemed bare⁠—barer than it should have been. But why should it look bare⁠—barer than it should have been⁠—unless she knew how much less bare it once was? Unless, in fact, she had seen it before?

“Oh, I know,” she cried, standing in her stiff skirts and heavy shoes in the middle of the room. “I know. This is Lord Arden’s town house. This is where I was with Cousin Betty. Only there aren’t such nice chairs and things, and it was full of people then.”

Edred remained silent, his mouth half open and his eyes half shut in a sort of trance of astonishment. This was very different from the last adventure in which he had taken part. For then he had only gone to the house in Arden Castle as it was in Boney’s time, and he had gone to it by the simple means of walking down a staircase with which he was already familiar. But now he had been transported in a most violent and unpleasing manner, not only from his own times to times much earlier, but also from Arden Castle, which he knew, to Arden House, which he did not know. So he was silent, and when he did speak it was with discontent verging on disgust.

“I don’t like it,” he began. “Let’s go back. I don’t like it. And we didn’t take the photograph. And I don’t like it. And my clothes are horrid. I feel something between a balloon and a Bluecoat boy. And you’ve no idea how silly you look⁠—like Mrs. Noah out of the Ark, only tubby. And I don’t know who we’re supposed to be. And I don’t suppose this is Arden House. And if it is, you don’t know when. Suppose it’s Inquisition times, and they put us on the stake? Let’s go back; I don’t like it,” he ended.

“Now you just listen,” said Elfrida, knitting her brows under the queer cap she wore. “I know inside me what I mean, but you won’t unless you jolly well attend.”

“Fire ahead.”

“Well, then, even if it was Inquisition times it would be all right⁠—for us.”

“How do you know?”

“I don’t know how I know, but I know I do know,” said Elfrida firmly. “You see, I’ve been here before. It’s not real, you see.”

“It is,” said Edred, kicking the leg of the table.