But she said, "Oh no, thank you. Indeed not, please. I really am so I
don't know which way to turn. Do run along, like dears."
So we ran along like these timid but graceful animals.
Need I tell the intellectual reader that we went straight off to the pen
above Stoneham Lock to see the anglers competing? Angling is the same
thing as fishing.
I am not going to try and explain locks to you. If you've never seen a
lock you could never understand even if I wrote it in words of one
syllable and pages and pages long. And if you have, you'll understand
without my telling you. It is harder than Euclid if you don't know
beforehand. But you might get a grown-up person to explain it to you
with books or wooden bricks.
I will tell you what a pen is because that is easy. It is the bit of
river between one lock and the next. In some rivers "pens" are called
"reaches," but pen is the proper word.
We went along the towing-path; it is shady with willows, aspens, alders,
elders, oaks and other trees. On the banks are flowers--yarrow,
meadow-sweet, willow herb, loose-strife, and lady's bed-straw. Oswald
learned the names of all these trees and plants on the day of the
picnic. The others didn't remember them, but Oswald did. He is a boy of
what they call relenting memory.
The anglers were sitting here and there on the shady bank among the
grass and the different flowers I have named. Some had dogs with them,
and some umbrellas, and some had only their wives and families.
We should have liked to talk to them and ask how they liked their lot,
and what kinds of fish there were, and whether they were nice to eat,
but we did not like to.
Denny had seen anglers before and he knew they liked to be talked to,
but though he spoke to them quite like to equals he did not ask the
things we wanted to know. He just asked whether they'd had any luck, and
what bait they used.
And they answered him back politely. I am glad I am not an angler. It is
an immovable amusement, and, as often as not, no fish to speak of after
all.
Daisy and Dora had stayed at home: Dora's foot was nearly well, but
they seem really to like sitting still. I think Dora likes to have a
little girl to order about. Alice never would stand it. When we got to
Stoneham Lock, Denny said he should go home and fetch his fishing-rod.
H. O. went with him. This left four of us--Oswald, Alice, Dicky, and
Noel. We went on down the towing-path.
The lock shuts up (that sounds as if it was like the lock on a door, but
it is very otherwise) between one pen of the river and the next; the pen
where the anglers were was full right up over the roots of the grass and
flowers.
But the pen below was nearly empty.
"You can see the poor river's bones," Noel said.
And so you could.
Stones and mud and dried branches, and here and there an old kettle or a
tin pail with no bottom to it, that some bargee had chucked in.
From walking so much along the river we knew many of the bargees.
Bargees are the captains and crews of the big barges that are pulled up
and down the river by slow horses. The horses do not swim. They walk on
the towing-path, with a rope tied to them, and the other end to the
barge. So it gets pulled along. The bargees we knew were a good friendly
sort, and used to let us go all over the barges when they were in a good
temper. They were not at all the sort of bullying, cowardly fiends in
human form that the young hero at Oxford fights a crowd of,
single-handed, in books.
The river does not smell nice when its bones are showing. But we went
along down, because Oswald wanted to get some cobbler's wax in Falding
village for a bird-net he was making.
But just above Falding Lock, where the river is narrow and straight, we
saw a sad and gloomy sight--a big barge sitting flat on the mud because
there was not water enough to float her.
There was no one on board, but we knew by a red flannel waistcoat that
was spread out to dry on top that the barge belonged to friends of ours.
Then Alice said, "They have gone to find the man who turns on the water
to fill the pen. I dare say they won't find him. He's gone to his
dinner, I shouldn't wonder. What a lovely surprise it would be if they
came back to find their barge floating high and dry on a lot of water!
_Do_ let's do it. It's a long time since any of us did a kind action
deserving of being put in the Book of Golden Deeds."
We had given that name to the minute-book of that beastly "Society of
the Wouldbegoods." Then you could think of the book if you wanted to
without remembering the Society. I always tried to forget both of them.
Oswald said, "But how? _You_ don't know how. And if you did we haven't
got a crow-bar."
I cannot help telling you that locks are opened with crow-bars. You push
and push till a thing goes up and the water runs through. It is rather
like the little sliding-door in the big door of a hen-house.
"I know where the crow-bar is," Alice said. "Dicky and I were down here
yesterday when you were su--" She was going to say sulking, I know, but
she remembered manners ere too late, so Oswald bears her no malice. She
went on: "Yesterday, when you were up-stairs. And we saw the
water-tender open the lock and the weir sluices. It's quite easy, isn't
it, Dicky?"
"As easy as kiss your hand," said Dicky; "and what's more, I know where
he keeps the other thing he opens the sluices with. I votes we do."
"Do let's, if we can," Noel said, "and the bargees will bless the names
of their unknown benefactors. They might make a song about us, and sing
it on winter nights as they pass round the wassail bowl in front of the
cabin fire."
Noel wanted to very much; but I don't think it was altogether for
generousness, but because he wanted to see how the sluices opened. Yet
perhaps I do but wrong the boy.
We sat and looked at the barge a bit longer, and then Oswald said, well,
he didn't mind going back to the lock and having a look at the
crow-bars. You see Oswald did not propose this; he did not even care
very much about it when Alice suggested it.
But when we got to Stoneham Lock, and Dicky dragged the two heavy
crow-bars from among the elder bushes behind a fallen tree, and began to
pound away at the sluice of the lock, Oswald felt it would not be manly
to stand idly apart. So he took his turn.
[Illustration: "DICKY DRAGGED THE TWO HEAVY BARS"]
It was very hard work, but we opened the lock sluices, and we did not
drop the crow-bar into the lock either, as I have heard of being done by
older and sillier people.
The water poured through the sluices all green and solid, as if it had
been cut with a knife, and where it fell on the water underneath the
white foam spread like a moving counterpane. When we had finished the
lock we did the weir--which is wheels and chains--and the water pours
through over the stones in a magnificent water-fall and sweeps out all
round the weir-pool.
The sight of the foaming water-falls was quite enough reward for our
heavy labors, even without the thought of the unspeakable gratitude that
the bargees would feel to us when they got back to their barge and found
her no longer a stick-in-the-mud, but bounding on the free bosom of the
river.
When we had opened all the sluices we gazed awhile on the beauties of
nature, and then went home, because we thought it would be more truly
noble and good not to wait to be thanked for our kind and devoted
action--and besides, it was nearly dinner-time, and Oswald thought it
was going to rain.
On the way home we agreed not to tell the others, because it would be
like boasting of our good acts.
"They will know all about it," Noel said, "when they hear us being
blessed by the grateful bargees, and the tale of the Unknown Helpers is
being told by every village fireside. And then they can write it in the
Golden Deed book."
So we went home. Denny and H. O. had thought better of it, and they were
fishing in the moat. They did not catch anything.
Oswald is very weather-wise--at least, so I have heard it said, and he
had thought there would be rain. There was. It came on while we were at
dinner--a great, strong, thundering rain, coming down in sheets--the
first rain we had had since we came to the Moat House.
We went to bed as usual. No presentiment of the coming awfulness clouded
our young mirth. I remember Dicky and Oswald had a wrestling match, and
Oswald won.
In the middle of the night Oswald was awakened by a hand on his face. It
was a wet hand and very cold. Oswald hit out, of course, but a voice
said, in a hoarse, hollow whisper:
"Don't be a young ass! Have you got any matches? My bed's full of water;
it's pouring down from the ceiling."
Oswald's first thought was that perhaps by opening those sluices we had
flooded some secret passage which communicated with the top of Moat
House, but when he was properly awake he saw that this could not be, on
account of the river being so low.
He had matches. He is, as I said before, a boy full of resources. He
struck one and lit a candle, and Dicky, for it was indeed he, gazed with
Oswald at the amazing spectacle.
Our bedroom floor was all wet in patches. Dicky's bed stood in a pond,
and from the ceiling water was dripping in rich profusion at a dozen
different places. There was a great wet patch in the ceiling, and that
was blue, instead of white like the dry part, and the water dripped from
different parts of it.
In a moment Oswald was quite unmanned.
"Krikey!" he said, in a heart-broken tone, and remained an instant
plunged in thought.
"What on earth are we to do?" Dicky said.
And really for a short time even Oswald did not know. It was a
blood-curdling event, a regular facer. Albert's uncle had gone to London
that day to stay till the next. Yet something must be done.
The first thing was to rouse the unconscious others from their deep
sleep, because the water was beginning to drip on to their beds, and
though as yet they knew it not, there was quite a pool on Noel's bed,
just in the hollow behind where his knees were doubled up, and one of H.
O.'s boots was full of water, that surged wildly out when Oswald
happened to kick it over.
We woke them--a difficult task, but we did not shrink from it.
Then we said, "Get up, there is a flood! Wake up, or you will be drowned
in your beds! And it's half-past two by Oswald's watch."
They awoke slowly and very stupidly. H. O. was the slowest and
stupidest.
The water poured faster and faster from the ceiling.
We looked at each other and turned pale, and Noel said:
"Hadn't we better call Mrs. Pettigrew?"
But Oswald simply couldn't consent to this. He could not get rid of the
feeling that this was our fault somehow for meddling with the river,
though of course the clear star of reason told him it could not possibly
be the case.
We all devoted ourselves, heart and soul, to the work before us. We put
the bath under the worst and wettest place, and the jugs and basins
under lesser streams, and we moved the beds away to the dry end of the
room. Ours is a long attic that runs right across the house.
But the water kept coming in worse and worse. Our night-shirts were wet
through, so we got into our other shirts and knickerbockers, but
preserved bareness in our feet. And the floor kept on being half an inch
deep in water, however much we mopped it up.
We emptied the basins out of the window as fast as they filled, and we
baled the bath with a jug without pausing to complain how hard the work
was. All the same, it was more exciting than you can think. But in
Oswald's dauntless breast he began to see that they would _have_ to call
Mrs. Pettigrew.
A new water-fall broke out between the fire-grate and the mantel-piece,
and spread in devastating floods. Oswald is full of ingenious devices. I
think I have said this before, but it is quite true; and perhaps even
truer this time than it was last time I said it.
He got a board out of the box-room next door, and rested one end in the
chink between the fire-place and the mantel-piece, and laid the other
end on the back of a chair, then we stuffed the rest of the chink with
our nightgowns, and laid a towel along the plank, and behold, a noble
stream poured over the end of the board right into the bath we put there
ready. It was like Niagara, only not so round in shape. The first lot of
water that came down the chimney was very dirty. The wind whistled
outside. Noel said, "If it's pipes burst, and not the rain, it will be
nice for the water-rates." Perhaps it was only natural after this for
Denny to begin with his everlasting poetry. He stopped mopping up the
water to say:
"By this the storm grew loud apace,
The water-rates were shrieking,
And in the howl of Heaven each face
Grew black as they were speaking."
Our faces were black, and our hands too, but we did not take any notice;
we only told him not to gas but to go on mopping. And he did. And we all
did.
But more and more water came pouring down. You would not believe so much
could come off one roof.
When at last it was agreed that Mrs. Pettigrew must be awakened at all
hazards, we went and woke Alice to do the fatal errand.
When she came back, with Mrs. Pettigrew in a night-cap and a red flannel
petticoat, we held our breath.
But Mrs. Pettigrew did not even say, "What on earth have you children
been up to _now_?" as Oswald had feared.
She simply sat down on my bed and said:
"Oh, dear! oh, dear! oh, dear!" ever so many times.
Then Denny said, "I once saw holes in a cottage roof. The man told me it
was done when the water came through the thatch. He said if the water
lies all about on the top of the ceiling it breaks it down, but if you
make holes the water will only come through the holes and you can put
pails under the holes to catch it."
So we made nine holes in the ceiling with the poker, and put pails,
baths, and tubs under, and now there was not so much water on the floor.
But we had to keep on working like niggers, and Mrs. Pettigrew and Alice
worked the same.
About five in the morning the rain stopped; about seven the water did
not come in so fast, and presently it only dripped slowly. Our task was
done.
This is the only time I was ever up all night. I wish it happened
oftener. We did not go back to bed then, but dressed and went down. We
all went to sleep in the afternoon, though. Quite without meaning to.
Oswald went up on the roof, before breakfast, to see if he could find
the hole where the rain had come in. He did not find any hole, but he
found the cricket-ball jammed in the top of a gutter-pipe, which he
afterwards knew ran down inside the wall of the house and ran into the
moat below. It seems a silly dodge, but so it was.
[Illustration: "'OH, DEAR! OH, DEAR!'"]
When the men went up after breakfast to see what had caused the flood
they said there must have been a good half-foot of water on the leads
the night before for it to have risen high enough to go above the edge
of the lead, and of course when it got above the lead there was nothing
to stop it running down under it, and soaking through the ceiling. The
parapet and the roofs kept it from tumbling off down the sides of the
house in the natural way. They said there must have been some
obstruction in the pipe which ran down into the house, but whatever it
was the water had washed it away, for they put wires down, and the pipe
was quite clear.
While we were being told this Oswald's trembling fingers felt at the wet
cricket-ball in his pocket. And he _knew_, but he _could_ not tell. He
heard them wondering what the obstruction could have been, and all the
time he had the obstruction in his pocket, and never said a single word.
I do not seek to defend him. But it really was an awful thing to have
been the cause of; and Mrs. Pettigrew is but harsh and hasty. But this,
as Oswald knows too well, is no excuse for his silent conduct.
That night at tea Albert's uncle was rather silent too. At last he
looked upon us with a glance full of intelligence, and said:
"There was a queer thing happened yesterday. You know there was an
angling competition. The pen was kept full on purpose. Some mischievous
busybody went and opened the sluices and let all the water out. The
anglers' holiday was spoiled. No, the rain wouldn't have spoiled it
anyhow, Alice; anglers _like_ rain. The 'Rose and Crown' dinner was half
of it wasted because the anglers were so furious that a lot of them took
the next train to town. And this is the worst of all--a barge, that was
on the mud in the pen below, was lifted and jammed across the river, and
then the water tilted her over, and her cargo is on the river bottom. It
was coals."
During this speech there were four of us who knew not where to turn our
agitated glances. Some of us tried bread and butter, but it seemed dry
and difficult, and those who tried tea choked and spluttered and were
sorry they had not let it alone.