"We all thank you heartily for your goodness. The entertainment was
beautiful. We shall never forget your kindness and hospitableness."
The lady laughed, and said she had been very pleased to have us. A fat
gentleman said--
"And your teas? I hope you enjoyed those--eh?"
Oswald had not had time to make up an answer to that, so he answered
straight from the heart, and said--
"Ra--_ther_!"
And every one laughed and slapped us boys on the back and kissed the
girls, and the gentleman who played the bones in the nigger minstrels
saw us home. We ate the cold pudding that night, and H.O. dreamed that
something came to eat him, like it advises you to in the advertisements
on the hoardings. The grown-ups said it was the pudding, but I don't
think it could have been that, because, as I have said more than once,
it was so very plain.
Some of H.O.'s brothers and sisters thought it was a judgment on him for
pretending about who the poor children were he was collecting the money
for. Oswald does not believe such a little boy as H.O. would have a real
judgment made just for him and nobody else, whatever he did.
But it certainly is odd. H.O. was the only one who had bad dreams, and
he was also the only one who got any of the things we bought with that
ill-gotten money, because, you remember, he picked a hole in the
raisin-paper as he was bringing the parcel home. The rest of us had
nothing, unless you count the scrapings of the pudding-basin, and those
don't really count at all.
_ARCHIBALD THE UNPLEASANT_
THE house of Bastable was once in poor, but honest, circs. That was when
it lived in a semi-detached house in the Lewisham Road, and looked for
treasure. There were six scions of the house who looked for it--in fact
there were seven, if you count Father. I am sure he looked right enough,
but he did not do it the right way. And we did. And so we found a
treasure of a great-uncle, and we and Father went to live with him in a
very affluent mansion on Blackheath--with gardens and vineries and
pineries and everything jolly you can think of. And then, when we were
no longer so beastly short of pocket-money, we tried to be good, and
sometimes it came out right, and sometimes it didn't. Something like
sums.
And then it was the Christmas holidays--and we had a bazaar and raffled
the most beautiful goat you ever saw, and we gave the money to the poor
and needy.
And then we felt it was time to do something new, because we were as
rich as our worthy relative, the uncle, and our Father--now also
wealthy, at least, compared to what he used to be--thought right for us;
and we were as good as we could be without being good for nothing and
muffs, which I hope no one calling itself a Bastable will ever stoop to.
So then Oswald, so often the leader in hazardous enterprises, thought
long and deeply in his interior self, and he saw that something must be
done, because, though there was still the goat left over, unclaimed by
its fortunate winner at the Bazaar, somehow no really fine idea seemed
to come out of it, and nothing else was happening. Dora was getting a
bit domineering, and Alice was too much taken up with trying to learn to
knit. Dicky was bored and so was Oswald, and Noel was writing far more
poetry than could be healthy for any poet, however young, and H.O. was
simply a nuisance. His boots are always much louder when he is not
amused, and that gets the rest of us into rows, because there are hardly
any grown-up persons who can tell the difference between his boots and
mine. Oswald decided to call a council (because even if nothing comes of
a council it always means getting Alice to drop knitting, and making
Noel chuck the poetical influences, that are no use and only make him
silly), and he went into the room that is our room. It is called the
common-room, like in colleges, and it is very different from the room
that was ours when we were poor, but honest. It is a jolly room, with a
big table and a big couch, that is most useful for games, and a thick
carpet because of H.O.'s boots.
Alice was knitting by the fire; it was for Father, but I am sure his
feet are not at all that shape. He has a high and beautifully formed
instep like Oswald's. Noel was writing poetry, of course.
"My dear sister sits
And knits,
I hope to goodness the stocking fits,"
was as far as he had got.
"It ought to be 'my dearest sister' to sound right," he said, "but that
wouldn't be kind to Dora."
"Thank you," said Dora, "You needn't trouble to be kind to me, if you
don't want to."
"Shut up, Dora!" said Dicky, "Noel didn't mean anything."
"He never does," said H.O., "nor yet his poetry doesn't neither."
"_And_ his poetry doesn't _either_," Dora corrected; "and besides, you
oughtn't to say that at all, it's unkind----"
"You're too jolly down on the kid," said Dicky.
And Alice said, "Eighty-seven, eighty-eight--oh, do be quiet half a
sec.!--eighty-nine, ninety--now I shall have to count the stitches all
over again!"
Oswald alone was silent and not cross. I tell you this to show that the
sort of worryingness was among us that is catching, like measles.
Kipling calls it the cameelious hump, and, as usual, that great and good
writer is quite correct.
So Oswald said, "Look here, let's have a council. It says in Kipling's
book when you've got the hump go and dig till you gently perspire. Well,
we can't do that, because it's simply pouring, but----"
The others all interrupted him, and said they hadn't got the hump and
they didn't know what he meant. So he shrugged his shoulders patiently
(it is not his fault that the others hate him to shrug his shoulders
patiently) and he said no more.
Then Dora said, "Oh, don't be so disagreeable, Oswald, for goodness'
sake!"