New Treasure Seekers; Or, The Bastable Children in Search of a Fortune
conceal any longer from the discerning reader that it was exactly what
we had been looking for. It was indeed a Celestial Chinaman in deep
difficulties with these boys who were, as Alice said afterwards, truly
fiends in mortal shape. They were laughing at the old Chinaman, and
shouting to each other, and their language was of that kind that I was
sorry we had got Alice with us. But she told Oswald afterwards that she
was so angry she did not know what they were saying.
"Pull his bloomin' pigtail," said one of these outcasts from decent
conduct.
The old man was trying to keep them off with both hands, but the hands
were very wrinkled and trembly.
Oswald is grateful to his good Father who taught him and Dicky the
proper way to put their hands up. If it had not been for that, Oswald
does not know what on earth would have happened, for the outcasts were
five to our two, because no one could have expected Alice to do what
she did.
Before Oswald had even got his hands into the position required by the
noble art of self-defence, she had slapped the largest boy on the face
as hard as ever she could--and she can slap pretty hard, as Oswald knows
but too well--and she had taken the second-sized boy and was shaking him
before Dicky could get his left in on the eye of the slapped assailant
of the aged denizen of the Flowery East. The other three went for
Oswald, but three to one is nothing to one who has hopes of being a
pirate in his spare time when he grows up.
In an instant the five were on us. Dicky and I got in some good ones,
and though Oswald cannot approve of my sister being in a street fight,
he must own she was very quick and useful in pulling ears and twisting
arms and slapping and pinching. But she had quite forgotten how to hit
out from the shoulder like I have often shown her.
The battle raged, and Alice often turned the tide of it by a well-timed
shove or nip. The aged Eastern leaned against the wall, panting and
holding his blue heart with his yellow hand. Oswald had got a boy down,
and was kneeling on him, and Alice was trying to pull off two other boys
who had fallen on top of the fray, while Dicky was letting the fifth
have it, when there was a flash of blue and another Chinaman dashed into
the tournament. Fortunately this one was not old, and with a few
well-directed, if foreign looking, blows he finished the work so ably
begun by the brave Bastables, and next moment the five loathsome and
youthful aggressors were bolting down the passage. Oswald and Dicky were
trying to get their breath and find out exactly where they were hurt and
how much, and Alice had burst out crying and was howling as though she
would never stop. That is the worst of girls--they never can keep
anything up. Any brave act they may suddenly do, when for a moment they
forget that they have not the honour to be boys, is almost instantly
made into contemptibility by a sudden attack of crybabyishness. But I
will say no more: for she did strike the first blow, after all, and it
did turn out that the boys had scratched her wrist and kicked her shins.
These things make girls cry.
The venerable stranger from distant shores said a good deal to the other
in what I suppose was the language used in China. It all sounded like
"hung" and "li" and "chi," and then the other turned to us and said--
"Nicee lilly girlee, same piecee flowelee, you takee my head to walkee
on. This is alle samee my father first chop ancestor. Dirty white devils
makee him hurt. You come alongee fightee ploper. Me likee you welly
muchee."
Alice was crying too much to answer, especially as she could not find
her handkerchief. I gave her mine, and then she was able to say that
she did not want to walk on anybody's head, and she wanted to go home.
"This not nicee place for lillee whitee girlee," said the young
Chinaman. His pigtail was thicker than his father's and black right up
to the top. The old man's was grey at the beginning, but lower down it
was black, because that part of it was not hair at all, but black
threads and ribbons and odds and ends of trimmings, and towards the end
both pigtails were greenish.
"Me lun backee takee him safee," the younger of the Eastern adventurers
went on, pointing to his father. "Then me makee walkee all alonk you,
takee you back same placee you comee from. Little white devils waitee
for you on ce load. You comee with? Not? Lillee girlee not cly. John
givee her one piecee pletty-pletty. Come makee talkee with the House
Lady."
I believe this is about what he said, and we understood that he wanted
us to come and see his mother, and that he would give Alice something
pretty, and then see us safe out of the horrible brown-grey country.
So we agreed to go with them, for we knew those five boys would be
waiting for us on the way back, most likely with strong reinforcements.
Alice stopped crying the minute she could--I must say she is better than
Dora in that way--and we followed the Chinamen, who walked in single
file like Indians, so we did the same, and talked to each other over our
shoulders. Our grateful Oriental friends led us through a good many
streets, and suddenly opened a door with a key, pulled us in, and shut
the door. Dick thought of the kidnapping of Florence Dombey and good
Mrs. Brown, but Oswald had no such unnoble thoughts.
The room was small, and very, very odd. It was very dirty too, but
perhaps it is not polite to say that. There was a sort of sideboard at
one end of the room, with an embroidered dirty cloth on it, and on the
cloth a bluey-white crockery image over a foot high. It was very fat and
army and leggy, and I think it was an idol. The minute we got inside the
young man lighted little brown sticks, and set them to burn in front of
it. I suppose it was incense. There was a sort of long, wide, low sofa,
without any arms or legs, and a table that was like a box, with another
box in front of it for you to sit down on when you worked, and on the
table were all sorts of tiny little tools--awls and brads they looked
like--and pipe-stems and broken bowls of pipes and mouthpieces, for our
rescued Chinaman was a pipe-mender by trade. There wasn't much else in
the room except the smell, and that seemed to fill it choke-full. The
smell seemed to have all sorts of things in it--glue and gunpowder, and
white garden lilies and burnt fat, and it was not so easy to breathe as
plain air.
Then a Chinese lady came in. She had green-grey trousers, shiny like
varnish, and a blue gown, and her hair was pulled back very tight, and
twisted into a little knob at the back.
She wanted to go down on the floor before Alice, but we wouldn't let
her. Then she said a great many things that we feel sure were very nice,
only they were in Chinese, so we could not tell what they were.
And the Chinaman said that his mother also wanted Alice to walk on her
head--not Alice's own, of course, but the mother's.
I wished we had stayed longer, and tried harder to understand what they
said, because it was an adventure, take it how you like, that we're not
likely to look upon the like of again. Only we were too flustered to see
this.
We said, "Don't mention it," and things like that; and when Dicky said,
"I think we ought to be going," Oswald said so too.
Then they all began talking Chinese like mad, and the Chinese lady came
back and suddenly gave Alice a parrot.
It was red and green, with a very long tail, and as tame as any pet fawn
I ever read about. It walked up her arm and round her neck, and stroked
her face with its beak. And it did not bite Oswald or Alice, or even
Dicky, though they could not be sure at first that it was not going to.
We said all the polite things we could, and the old lady made thousands
of hurried Chinese replies, and repeated many times, "All litey, John,"
which seemed to be all the English she knew.
We never had so much fuss made over us in all our lives. I think it was
that that upset our calmness, and seemed to put us into a sort of silly
dream that made us not see what idiots we were to hurry off from scenes
we should never again behold. So we went. And the youthful Celestial saw
us safely to the top of Bullamy's Stairs, and left us there with the
parrot and floods of words that seemed all to end in double "e."
We wanted to show him to the others, but he would not come, so we
rejoined our anxious relations without him.
The scene of rejoinder was painful, at first because they were most
frightfully sick at us having been such an age away; but when we let
them look at the parrot, and told them about the fight, they agreed that
it was not our fault, and we really had been unavoidably detained.
But Dora said, "Well, you may say I'm always preaching, but I _don't_
think Father would like Alice to be fighting street boys in Millwall."
"I suppose _you'd_ have run away and let the old man be killed," said
Dicky, and peace was not restored till we were nearly at Greenwich
again.
We took the tram to Greenwich Station, and then we took a cab home (and
well worth the money, which was all we now had got, except
fourpence-halfpenny), for we were all dog-tired.
And dog-tired reminds me that we hadn't found Pincher, in spite of all
our trouble.
Miss Blake, who is our housekeeper, was angrier than I have ever seen
her. She had been so anxious that she had sent the police to look for
us. But, of course, they had not found us. You ought to make allowances
for what people do when they are anxious, so I forgive her everything,
even what she said about Oswald being a disgrace to a respectable house.
He owns we were rather muddy, owing to the fight.
And when the jaw was over and we were having tea--and there was meat to
it, because we were as near starving as I ever wish to be--we all ate
lots. Even the thought of Pincher could not thwart our bold appetites,
though we kept saying, "Poor old Pincher!" "I do wish we'd found him,"
and things like that. The parrot walked about among the tea-things as
tame as tame. And just as Alice was saying how we'd go out again
to-morrow and have another try for our faithful hound there was a
scratching at the door, and we rushed--and there was Pincher, perfectly
well and mad with joy to see us.
H.O. turned an abrupt beetroot colour.
"Oh!" he said.
We said, "What? Out with it."
And though he would much rather have kept it a secret buried in his
breast, we made him own that he had shut Pincher up yesterday in the
empty rabbit-hutch when he was playing Zoological Gardens and forgotten
all about it in the pleasures of our cousin having left us.
So we need not have gone over the water at all. But though Oswald pities
all dumb animals, especially those helplessly shut in rabbit-hutches at
the bottoms of gardens, he cannot be sorry that we had such a Celestial
adventure and got hold of such a parrot. For Alice says that Oswald and
Dicky and she shall have the parrot between them.
She is tremendously straight. I often wonder why she was made a girl.
She's a jolly sight more of a gentleman than half the boys at our
school.
_THE YOUNG ANTIQUARIES_
THIS really happened before Christmas, but many authors go back to
bygone years for whole chapters, and I don't see why I shouldn't.
It was one Sunday--the Somethingth Sunday in Advent, I think--and Denny
and Daisy and their father and Albert's uncle came to dinner, which is
in the middle of the day on that day of rest and the same things to eat
for grown-ups and us. It is nearly always roast beef and Yorkshire, but
the puddings and vegetables are brightly variegated and never the same
two Sundays running.