"This is the story of Agincourt.
If you don't know it you jolly well ought.
It was a famous battle fair,
And all your ancestors fought there
That is if you come of a family old.
The Bastables do; they were always very bold.
And at Agincourt
They fought
As they ought;
So we have been taught."
And so on and so on, till some of us wondered why poetry was ever
invented. But Mrs. Red House said she liked it awfully, so Noel said--
"You may have it to keep. I've got another one of it at home."
"I'll put it next my heart, Noel," she said. And she did, under the blue
stuff and fur.
H.O.'s was last, but when we let him read it he wouldn't, so Dora opened
his envelope and it was thick inside with blotting-paper, and in the
middle there was a page with
"1066 WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR,"
and nothing else.
"Well," he said, "I said I'd write all I knew about 1066, and that's it.
I can't write more than I know, can I?" The girls said he couldn't, but
Oswald thought he might have tried.
"It wasn't worth blacking your face all over just for that," he said.
But Mrs. Red House laughed very much and said it was a lovely paper, and
told _her_ all she wanted to know about 1066.
Then we went into the garden again and ran races, and Mrs. Red House
held all our spectacles for us and cheered us on. She said she was the
Patent Automatic Cheering Winning-post. We do like her.
Lunch was the glorious end of the Morden House Antiquarian Society and
Field Club's Field Day. But after lunch was the beginning of a real
adventure such as real antiquarians hardly ever get. This will be
unrolled later. I will finish with some French out of a newspaper.
Albert's uncle told it me, so I know it is right. Any of your own
grown-ups will tell you what it means.
_Au prochain numero je vous promets des emotions._
* * * * *
PS.--In case your grown-ups can't be bothered, "_emotions_" mean
sensation, I believe.
_THE INTREPID EXPLORER AND HIS LIEUTENANT_
WE had spectacles to play antiquaries in, and the rims were vaselined to
prevent rust, and it came off on our faces with other kinds of dirt, and
when the antiquary game was over, Mrs. Red House helped us to wash it
off with all the thoroughness of aunts, and far more gentleness.
Then, clean and with our hairs brushed, we were led from the bath-room
to the banqueting hall or dining-room.
It is a very beautiful house. The girls thought it was bare, but Oswald
likes bareness because it leaves more room for games. All the furniture
was of agreeable shapes and colours, and so were all the things on the
table--glasses and dishes and everything. Oswald politely said how nice
everything was.
The lunch was a blissful dream of perfect A.1.-ness. Tongue, and nuts,
and apples, and oranges, and candied fruits, and ginger-wine in tiny
glasses that Noel said were fairy goblets. Everybody drank everybody
else's health--and Noel told Mrs. Red House just how lovely she was,
and he would have paper and pencil and write her a poem for her very
own. I will not put it in here, because Mr. Red House is an author
himself, and he might want to use it in some of his books. And the
writer of these pages has been taught to think of others, and besides I
expect you are jolly well sick of Noel's poetry.
[Illustration: THE LUNCH WAS A BLISSFUL DREAM OF A.1.-NESS.]
There was no restrainingness about that lunch. As far as a married lady
can possibly be a regular brick, Mrs. Red House is one. And Mr. Red
House is not half bad, and knows how to talk about interesting things
like sieges, and cricket, and foreign postage stamps.
Even poets think of things sometimes, and it was Noel who said directly
he had finished his poetry,
"Have you got a secret staircase? And have you explored your house
properly?"
"Yes--we have," said that well-behaved and unusual lady--Mrs. Red House,
"but _you_ haven't. You may if you like. Go anywhere," she added with
the unexpected magnificence of a really noble heart. "Look at
everything--only don't make hay. Off with you!" or words to that effect.
And the whole of us, with proper thanks, offed with us instantly, in
case she should change her mind.
I will not describe the Red House to you--because perhaps you do not
care about a house having three staircases and more cupboards and odd
corners than we'd ever seen before, and great attics with beams, and
enormous drawers on rollers, let into the wall--and half the rooms not
furnished, and those that were all with old-looking, interesting
furniture. There was something about that furniture that even the
present author can't describe--as though any of it might have secret
drawers or panels--even the chairs. It was all beautiful, and mysterious
in the deepest degree.
When we had been all over the house several times, we thought about the
cellars. There was only one servant in the kitchen (so we saw Mr. and
Mrs. Red House must be poor but honest, like we used to be), and we said
to her--
"How do you do? We've got leave to go wherever we like, and please where
are the cellars, and may we go in?"
She was quite nice, though she seemed to think there was an awful lot of
us. People often think this. She said:
"Lor, love a duck--yes, I suppose so," in not ungentle tones, and showed
us.
I don't think we should ever have found the way from the house into the
cellar by ourselves. There was a wide shelf in the scullery with a row
of gentlemanly boots on it that had been cleaned, and on the floor in
front a piece of wood. The general servant--for such indeed she proved
to be--lifted up the wood and opened a little door under the shelf. And
there was the beginning of steps, and the entrance to them was half
trap-door, and half the upright kind--a thing none of us had seen
before.
She gave us a candle-end, and we pressed forward to the dark unknown.
The stair was of stone, arched overhead like churches--and it twisted
most unlike other cellar stairs. And when we got down it was all arched
like vaults, very cobwebby.
"Just the place for crimes," said Dicky. There was a beer cellar, and a
wine cellar with bins, and a keeping cellar with hooks in the ceiling
and stone shelves--just right for venison pasties and haunches of the
same swift animal.
Then we opened a door and there was a cellar with a well in it.
"To throw bodies down, no doubt," Oswald explained.
They were cellars full of glory, and passages leading from one to the
other like the Inquisition, and I wish ours at home were like them.
There was a pile of beer barrels in the largest cellar, and it was H.O.
who said, "Why not play 'King of the Castle?'"
So we did. We had a most refreshing game. It was exactly like Denny to
be the one who slipped down behind the barrels, and did not break a
single one of all his legs or arms.
"No," he cried, in answer to our anxious inquiries. "I'm not hurt a
bit, but the wall here feels soft--at least not soft--but it doesn't
scratch your nails like stone does, so perhaps it's the door of a secret
dungeon or something like that."
"Good old Dentist!" replied Oswald, who always likes Denny to have ideas
of his own, because it was us who taught him the folly of
white-mousishness.
"It might be," he went on, "but these barrels are as heavy as lead, and
much more awkward to collar hold of."
"Couldn't we get in some other way?" Alice said. "There ought to be a
subterranean passage. I expect there is if we only knew."