The Wonderful Garden or The Three Cs

‘How sweet of him,’ the girls agreed, and Charles wanted to know what sort of expenses he meant.

‘“Incidental”? Oh, if you want an apple or some chocks in a hurry and don’t happen to have any on you,’ Rupert explained. ‘Or ginger beer. Or raw eggs to suck as you go along; they’re very sustaining when all other food’s despaired of.’

The Uncle must have given orders, for Harriet soon brought in four neat brown-paper parcels.

‘Your lunches,’ she said. ‘Hope you’ll enjoy yourselves. You’ve got a nice day for your outing. Bring me a keepsake, won’t you? from wherever it is you’re going to.’

‘Of course we will,’ said Charlotte. ‘What would you like?’

But Harriet laughed, and said she was only talking.

They put on their thinnest clothes, for it was a very hot day, and they got William to cut them ash-sticks, ‘in case we want to be pilgrims with staffs,’ said Charles. The girls were very anxious for Rupert to wear his school blazer, and so flattering were their opinions of it, and of him, and of it on him, and of him in it, that he consented. Charles wore his school blazer, and the girls’ frocks were of blue muslin, and they had their soft white muslin hats, so they looked very bright and yet very cool as they started off down the drive with their ash-sticks over their shoulders and their brown-paper parcels in knotted handkerchiefs dangling from the ends of the sticks.

‘Who shall we be?’ Charlotte asked, as they passed into the shadow of the woods where the road runs through to the lodge gate.

‘I’ll be Nansen,’ said Charles. ‘I wish we had some Equismo dogs and a sledge.’

‘It’s Eskimo,’ said Rupert.

‘I know it is,’ said Charles.

‘I don’t believe you did,’ said Rupert, and Charles turned red and the girls looked at each other uncomfortably.

‘I didn’t say I did,’ Charles answered. ‘Not when I said it first. I meant I know now you’ve told me. It looked like Equismo in the books.’

This was disarming. Rupert could do no less than thump Charles on the back and say, ‘Sorry, old man’; and Caroline hastened to say, ‘What will you be, Rupert?’

‘Why, Rupert, of course. Prince Rupert. He invented Prince Rupert drops that are glass and crumble to powder if you look at them too hard. And he fought at Naseby – Rupert of the Rhine, you know. “For Charles, King of England, and Rupert of the Rhine!”’ he shouted.

‘Oh, I say,’ Charles urged, ‘do let me be Charles if you’re Rupert. It’s only fair.’

‘You can’t keep changing,’ said Rupert. ‘Besides, Charles had his head chopped off afterwards.’

‘Well, Rupert died too, if you come to that. You might, Rupert.’

And the girls said, ‘Do let him’; so Rupert said, ‘All right, he didn’t mind.’

Charlotte said she thought she would be Charles the Second, because he was a merry monarch; but it was decided that it might be confusing to have two Charles’s; so she had to be content with being Joan of Arc, while Caroline was Boadicea.

‘She was British, you see,’ Caroline explained; ‘and Aunt Emmeline says you ought to support home industries.’

‘Now we all call each other by our play names all day,’ Charlotte said, ‘and if you make a mistake you lose a mark.’

‘Who keeps the marks?’

‘You keep your own, of course – counting on your fingers. And if you did it ten times, you’d tie a knot in your handkerchief. Aunts do it ten times if they play often. We don’t.’

Here Boadicea, Joan of Arc, Prince Rupert, and King Charles turned out of the lodge gate, and the exploring expedition began at seventeen minutes past ten, precisely. The three C.’s kept up the game, calling each other by the new names with frequency and accurateness; but Rupert grew more and more silent, and when Charlotte addressed him as Prince Rupert the stainless knight, he told her not to be silly.

At a quarter-past twelve, the four children, very dusty, very hot and rather tired, reached a level crossing. The gates were shut because a train was coming, and already, as you looked along the line, you could see the front of the engine getting bigger and blacker, and the steam from it getting whiter and puffier, and you could feel the vibration of its coming in the shuddering of the gate as you leaned on it.

The train stopped, in a snorting, panting hurry, at the little station just beside the gates, let out a few passengers, shook itself impatiently, screamed, and went on. The big gates across the road swung slowly back till they stretched across the railway, and the people who had got out of the train came down the sloping end of the platform and through the small swing-gates, and the four children, who were crossing the line, met the little crowd from the train half-way. There were two women with baskets, a man with a bandy-legged dog, and a girl with a large band-box partly hidden by brown paper, and – the four children were face to face with him before they knew that there was any one coming from that train whom they had rather not be face to face with – the Murdstone man himself. He was not a yard from them. Rupert threw up his head and backed a little as if he expected to be hit. The three C.’s breathed a deep concerted ‘Oh!’ and trembled on the edge of what might be going to happen. No one knew what Mr. Murdstone’s power might be. Could he seize on Rupert and take him away? Could he call the police? Anything seemed possible in that terrible instant when they were confronted, suddenly and beyond hope of retreat, with the hated master.

And nothing happened at all. The Murdstone man passed by. He gave a cold, sour, unrecognising glance at the three C.’s, but he never looked at Rupert. He looked over his head as though Rupert had not been there, and passed on.

Rupert grew very red and said nothing. The girls looked at each other.

‘Let’s walk along by the river,’ said Caroline, ‘and then we’ll tell you why he didn’t look at you.’

‘You’ll tell me now,’ said Rupert firmly, ‘or I won’t go another step.’

‘He didn’t look at you,’ said Charlotte, ‘because he didn’t see you. And he didn’t see you because you were invisible just when you wanted to be.’

‘I didn’t want to be,’ said Rupert; ‘at least – Oh, well, come on.’

When they had reached a green meadow that sloped pleasantly to the willow-fringed edge of the river Medway, Charlotte said:

‘You were invisible, to him. That’s the magic. Perhaps you’ll believe in spells now.’

‘But there wasn’t any spell,’ said Rupert impatiently.

And the girls said with one voice, ‘You take off your blazer and see.’

‘I hate hanky panky,’ said Rupert, but he took off the coat.

‘Look, in there,’ said Caroline, turning back that loose fold which the button-holes are made in – ‘fern-seed. Char and I seccotined it on while you and Charles were washing your hands. We meant to ask you to wish to be invisible when we went into a shop or something, just to prove about spells, but you did it without our asking. And now you will believe, won’t you?’

‘I can’t,’ said Rupert; ‘don’t talk about it any more. Let’s have the grub out.’

They opened the parcels and ‘had the grub out,’ and it was sandwiches, and jam-tarts packed face to face, and raspberries in a card-board box that had once held chocolates – that was in Rupert’s parcel – and biscuits, and large wedges of that pleasant solid cake which you still get sometimes in old-fashioned houses where baking powder and self-raising flour are unknown.

‘This is the first picnic we’ve ever had by ourselves; don’t you like it, Prince Rupert?’

Rupert’s mouth was full of sandwich. He was understood to say that it was ‘all right.’

‘King Charles is gracefully pleased to like it,’ said Charles. ‘Boadicea had better pour out the Rhine wine, for it’s a thirsty day.’

‘Oh,’ said Boadicea in stricken tones, ‘there isn’t any!’

And there wasn’t. Not a drop of milk or water or ginger-beer or anything drinkable. No nephew or niece of Aunt Emmeline’s was likely to do anything so rash as drinking water from a strange river to which it had not been properly introduced, so there was nothing to be done but to eat the raspberries and pretend that raspberries quenched thirst, which, as you probably know only too well, they don’t.

This was why, when they had eaten everything there was to eat, and buried the bits of paper deeply in a hollow tree, so as not to spoil the pretty picture of green willows and blue-green water and grass-green grass, they set out to find a cottage where ginger-beer was sold. There was such a cottage, and they had passed it on the way. It had a neat gay little garden and a yellow rose clambering over its porch, and on one of its red brick sides was a pear-tree that went up the wall with level branches like a double ladder, and on the other a deep-blue iron plate which said in plain white words ‘Bateyes Minerals.’ A stranger from Queen Victoria’s early days might have supposed this to mean that the cottage had a small museum of geological specimens such as you find now and then in Derbyshire; but Rupert and the three C.’s knew that ‘Minerals’ was just short for ginger-beer and other things that fizz.

So, after making sure that they had not lost their two shillings and their sixpence, they unlatched the white gate and went in.

The front door, which was green and had no knocker, was open, and one could see straight into the cottage’s front parlour. It was very neat and oil-clothy, with sea-shells on pink wool mats, and curly glass vases, and a loud green-faced clock on the mantelpiece. There was a horse-hair sofa and more white crochet antimacassars than you would have thought possible even in the most respectable sea-side lodgings. A black and white cat was asleep in the sun, edged in among the pots of geraniums that filled the window. In fact, it was a very clean example of the cottage homes of England, how beautiful they stand!

The thirsty children waited politely as long as they could bear to wait, and then Caroline tip-toed across the speckless brown-and-blue linoleum and tapped at the inner door. Nothing happened. So she pushed the door, which was ajar, a little more open and looked through it. Then she turned, shook her head, made a baffling sign to the others to stay where they were, and went through the door and shut it after her.