"Would it be all the same to you if we went and looked at the sea first?
Because----"
And she said, "Not at all," adding something about "Nature, the dear old
nurse, taking somebody on her knee," and let us go.
We asked her which way, and we tore up the road and through the village
and on to the sea-wall, and then with six joyous bounds we leaped down
on to the sand.
The author will not bother you with a description of the mighty billows
of ocean, which you must have read about, if not seen, but he will just
say what perhaps you are not aware of--that seagulls eat clams and
mussels and cockles, and crack the shells with their beaks. The author
has seen this done.
You also know, I suppose, that you can dig in the sand (if you have a
spade) and make sand castles, and stay in them till the tide washes you
out.
I will say no more, except that when we gazed upon the sea and the sand
we felt we did not care tuppence how highly Miss Sandal might think of
us or how plainly she might make us live, so long as we had got the
briny deep to go down to.
It was too early in the year and too late in the day to bathe, but we
paddled, which comes to much the same thing, and you almost always have
to change everything afterwards.
When it got dark we had to go back to the White House, and there was
supper, and then we found that Miss Sandal did not keep a servant, so of
course we offered to help wash up. H.O. only broke two plates.
Nothing worth telling about happened till we had been there over a week,
and had got to know the coastguards and a lot of the village people
quite well. I do like coastguards. They seem to know everything you want
to hear about. Miss Sandal used to read to us out of poetry books, and
about a chap called Thoreau, who could tickle fish, and they liked it,
and let him. She was kind, but rather like her house--there was
something bare and bald about her inside mind, I believe. She was very,
very calm, and said that people who lost their tempers were not living
the higher life. But one day a telegram came, and then she was not calm
at all. She got quite like other people, and quite shoved H.O. for
getting in her way when she was looking for her purse to pay for the
answer to the telegram.
Then she said to Dora--and she was pale and her eyes red, just like
people who live the lower or ordinary life--"My dears, it's dreadful! My
poor brother! He's had a fall. I must go to him at _once_." And she sent
Oswald to order the fly from the Old Ship Hotel, and the girls to see if
Mrs. Beale would come and take care of us while she was away. Then she
kissed us all and went off very unhappy. We heard afterwards that poor,
worthy Mr. Sandal had climbed a scaffolding to give a workman a tract
about drink, and he didn't know the proper part of the scaffolding to
stand on (the workman did, of course) so he fetched down half a dozen
planks and the workman, and if a dust-cart hadn't happened to be passing
just under so that they fell into it their lives would not have been
spared. As it was Mr. Sandal broke his arm and his head. The workman
escaped unscathed but furious. The workman was a teetotaler.
Mrs. Beale came, and the first thing she did was to buy a leg of mutton
and cook it. It was the first meat we had had since arriving at
Lymchurch.
[Illustration: HE FETCHED DOWN HALF A DOZEN PLANKS AND THE WORKMAN.]
"I 'spect she can't afford good butcher's meat," said Mrs. Beale; "but
your pa, I expect he pays for you, and I lay he'd like you to have your
fill of something as'll lay acrost your chesties." So she made a
Yorkshire pudding as well. It was good.
After dinner we sat on the sea-wall, feeling more like after dinner than
we had felt for days, and Dora said--
"Poor Miss Sandal! I never thought about her being hard-up, somehow. I
wish we could do something to help her."
"We might go out street-singing," Noel said. But that was no good,
because there is only one street in the village, and the people there
are much too poor for one to be able to ask them for anything. And all
round it is fields with only sheep, who have nothing to give except
their wool, and when it comes to taking that, they are never asked.
Dora thought we might get Father to give her money, but Oswald knew this
would never do.
Then suddenly a thought struck some one--I will not say who--and that
some one said--
"She ought to let lodgings, like all the other people do in Lymchurch."
That was the beginning of it. The end--for that day--was our getting the
top of a cardboard box and printing on it the following lines in as
many different coloured chalks as we happened to have with us.