Oswald Bastable and Others

The dauntless Oswald took off his jacket, and, wrapping it round his fist, shoved at the pane nearest the window fastening. The glass fell inwards with the noise you would expect. In newspapers I suppose they would call it a sickening thud. Really it was a sort of hollow tinkling sound. It made even Oswald jump, and H. O. said:

'Suppose the window opens straight into a bottomless well!'

We did not think this likely, but you cannot be too careful when you are exploring.

Oswald got in his hand and undid the window fastening, which was very rusty. The window opened out like a door. There was only just room in the area under the bars for Oswald and the opening of the window. He leaned forward and looked in. He was not surprised to find that it was not a well, after all, but a cellar.

'Come on,' he said; 'it's all right.'

Dicky came on so rapidly that his boots grazed the shoulder of the advancing Oswald. Alice was coming next, but Noël begged her to wait.

'I don't think H. O. ought to go in till we're sure it's safe,' he said; and Oswald hopes it was not because Noël was in a funk himself, though with a poet you never know.

The cellar into which Oswald now plunged had a damp and mouldering smell, like of mouse-traps, and straw, and beer-barrels. Another cellar opened out of it, and in this there was traces of coal having existed in other ages.

Passing the coal-cellar, we went out to a cellar with shelves on the wall like berths in a ship, or the catacombs where early Christians used to be bricked up. Of course, we knew it was only a wine-cellar, because we have one at home. Matches had to be used here. Then we found a flight of stone steps and went up. And Oswald is not ashamed to own that, the staircase being of a twisty nature, he did think what it would be like if he and Dicky were to meet Something at one of the corners; but all was peace and solitude. Yet it was with joy, and like meeting an old friend, that we got out of the cellars, stairs, and through a door to the back-kitchen, where the sink was, and the copper and the plate-rack. Oswald felt like a brother to the broken coal-scuttle. Our first instant thought was the back door.

It was bolted top and bottom, and the bolts were sort of cemented into their places with rust. But they were unable to resist our patient and determined onslaught. Only when we had undone them the door kept shut, and by stooping down and looking we saw that this was because it was locked.

Dicky at once despaired, and said, 'It's no go.'

But the researchful Oswald looked round, and there was a key on a nail, which shows how wrong it is to despair.

It was not the right key, proving later to be the key of the chicken-house. So we went into the hall. There was a bunch of keys on a nail on the back of the front-door.

'There now, you see I was right,' remarked Oswald. And he was, as is so often the case. All the keys had labels, and one of these said 'Back-kitchen,' so we applied it at once, and the locked door yielded to it.

'You can bring H. O. in quite safely,' Oswald said when the door had creakingly consented to open itself, and to disclose the sunshine, and the paved yard with the paving stones marked out with green grass, and the interested expressions on the faces of Alice and the others. 'It's quite safe. It's just a house like anyone else's, only it hasn't got any furniture in it.'

We went all over the house. There were fourteen rooms altogether, fifteen if you counted the back-kitchen where the plate-warmer was, and the copper, and the sink with the taps, and the brotherly coal-scuttle. The rooms were quite different from the ones in old nurse's house. Noël said he thought all the rooms in this house had been the scene of duels or elopements, or concealing rightful heirs. The present author doesn't know about that, but there was a splendid cupboardiness about the place that spoke volumes to a discerning eye. Even the window seats, of which there were six, lifted up like the lids of boxes, and you could have hidden a flying Cavalier in any of them, if he had been of only medium height and slender build, like heroes with swords so often are.

Then there were three staircases, and these must have been darkly convenient for getting conspirators away when the King's officers were at the door, as so constantly happened in romantic times.

The whole house was full of ideas for ripping games, and when we came away Alice said:

'We must be really better than we know. We must have done something to deserve a find like this.'

'Don't worry,' said Oswald. 'Albert's uncle says you always have to pay for everything. We haven't paid for this yet.'

This reflection, like so many of our young hero's, was correct.

I have not yet told you about the finest find of all the fine finds we found finally (that looks very odd, and I am not sure if it is allity-what's-its-name, or only carelessness. I wonder whether other authors are ever a prey to these devastating doubts?) This find was on the top floor. It was a room with bars to the windows, and it was a very odd shape. You went along a passage to the door, and then there was the room; but the room went back along the same way as the passage had come, so that when you went round there no one could see you from the door. The door was sort of in the middle of the room; but I see I must draw it for you, or you will never understand.

The door that is marked 'Another Door' was full of agitated excitement for us, because it wasn't a door at all – at least, not the kind that you are used to. It was a gate, like you have at the top of nursery stairs in the mansions of the rich and affluent; but instead of being halfway up, it went all the way up, so that you could see into the room through the bars.

'Somebody must have kept tame lunatics here,' said Dicky.

'Or bears,' said H. O.

'Or enchanceried Princes,' said Noël.

'It seems silly, though,' said Alice, 'because the lunatic or the bear or the enchanted Prince could always hide round the corner when he heard the keepers coming, if he didn't happen to want to show off just then.'

This was so, and the deep mystery of the way this room was built was never untwisted.

'Perhaps a Russian prisoner was kept there,' said Alice, 'and they did not want to look too close for fear he would shoot them with his bomb-gun. Poor man! perhaps he caught vodka, or some other of those awful foreign diseases, and died in his hidden confinement.'

It was a most ripping room for games. The key of it was on the bunch labelled 'Mrs. S.'s room.' We often wondered who Mrs. S. was.

'Let's have a regular round of gaieties,' said Oswald. 'Each of us to take it in turns to have the room, and act what they like, and the others look through the bars.'

So next day we did this.

Oswald, of course, dressed up in bath-towels and a sheet as the ghost of Mrs. S., but Noël and H. O. screamed, and would not be calm till he tore off the sheet and showed his knickerbockers and braces as a guarantee of good faith. Alice put her hair up, and got a skirt, and a large handkerchief to cry in, and was a hapless maiden imprisoned in a tower because she would not marry the wicked Baron. Oswald instantly took the part of the wicked Baron, and Dicky was the virtuous lover of low degree, and they had a splendid combat, and Dicky carried off the lady. Of course, that was the proper end to the story, and Oswald had to pretend to be beaten, which was not the case.

Dicky was Louis XVI. watch-making while waiting for the guillotine to happen. So we were the guillotine, and he was executed in the paved yard.

Noël was an imprisoned troubadour dressed in bright antimacassars, and he fired off quite a lot of poetry at us before we could get the door open, which was most unfair.

H. O. was a clown. He had no fancy dress except flour and two Turkish towels pinned on to look like trousers, but he put the flour all over himself, and it took the rest of the day to clean him.

It was when Alice was drying the hair-brushes that she had washed after brushing the flour out of Noël's hair in the back-garden that Oswald said:

'I know what that room was made for.'

And everyone said, 'What?' which is not manners, but your brothers and sisters do not mind because it saves time.

'Why, coiners,' said Oswald. 'Don't you see? They kept a sentinel at the door, that is a door, and if anyone approached he whispered "Cave."'

'But why have iron bars?'

'In extra safety,' said Oswald; 'and if their nefarious fires were not burning he need not say "Cave" at all. It's no use saying anything for nothing.'

It is curious, but the others did not seem to see this clear distinguishedness. All people have not the same fine brains.

But all the same the idea rankled in their hearts, and one day father came and took Dicky up to London about that tooth of his, and when Dicky came back he said:

'Look here, talking of coiners, there was a man in St. Swithin's Lane to-day selling little bottles of yellow stuff, and he rubbed some of it on a penny, and it turned the penny into a half-crown before your eyes – a new half-crown! It was a penny a bottle, so I bought three bottles.'

'I always thought the plant for coining was very expensive,' said Alice.

'Ah! they tell you that to keep you from doing it, because of its being a crime,' said Dicky. 'But now I've got this stuff we can begin to be coiners right away. I believe it isn't really a crime unless you try to buy things with the base coin.'

So that very afternoon, directly after dinner, which had a suet pudding in it that might have weighed down the enterprising spirit of anyone but us, we went over to the Enchanceried House.

We found our good rope ladder among its congealing bed of trusty nettles, and got over into the paved yard, and through the kitchen-door. Oswald always carried the key of this hung round his neck by a bootlace, as if it was a talisman, or the hair of his lost love. Of course, Oswald never had a lost love. He would scorn the action. But some heroes do have. De gustibus something or other, which means, one man's meat is another man's poison.

When we got up into the room with the iron-grated door, it all seemed very bare. Three bottles of yellow stuff and tenpence halfpenny in coppers is not much to start a coining enterprise with.