New Treasure Seekers; Or, The Bastable Children in Search of a Fortune
"transformation," and that duchesses wear them.
We had to be very secret about the dressing-up that night, and to put
Blakie's things all back when they had been tried on.
Dora did Alice's hair. She twisted up what little hair Alice has got by
natural means, and tied on a long tail of hair that was Miss Blake's
too. Then she twisted that up, bun-like, with many hairpins. Then the
wiglet, or transformation, was plastered over the front part, and Miss
Blake's Sunday hat, which is of a very brisk character, with half a blue
bird in it, was placed on top of everything. There were several
petticoats used, and a brown dress and some stockings and hankies to
stuff it out where it was too big. A black jacket and crimson tie
completed the picture. We thought Alice would do.
Then Oswald went out of the room and secretly assumed his dark disguise.
But when he came in with the beard on, and a hat of Father's, the others
were not struck with admiration and respect, like he meant them to be.
They rolled about, roaring with laughter, and when he crept into Miss
Blake's room and turned up the gas a bit, and looked in her long glass,
he owned that they were right and that it was no go. He is tall for his
age, but that beard made him look like some horrible dwarf; and his hair
being so short added to everything. Any idiot could have seen that the
beard had not originally flourished where it now was, but had been
transplanted from some other place of growth.
And when he laughed, which now became necessary, he really did look most
awful. He has read of beards wagging, but he never saw it before.
While he was looking at himself the girls had thought of a new idea.
But Oswald had an inside presentiment that made it some time before he
could even consent to listen to it. But at last, when the others
reminded him that it was a noble act, and for the good of Albert's
uncle, he let them explain the horrid scheme in all its lurid parts.
It was this: That Oswald should consent to be disguised in women's
raiments and go with Alice to see the Editor.
No man ever wants to be a woman, and it was a bitter thing for Oswald's
pride, but at last he consented. He is glad he is not a girl. You have
no idea what it is like to wear petticoats, especially long ones. I
wonder that ladies continue to endure their miserable existences. The
top parts of the clothes, too, seemed to be too tight and too loose in
the wrong places. Oswald's head, also, was terribly in the way. He had
no wandering hairs to fasten transformations on to, even if Miss Blake
had had another one, which was not the case. But the girls remembered a
governess they had once witnessed whose hair was brief as any boy's, so
they put a large hat, with a very tight elastic behind, on to Oswald's
head, just as it was, and then with a tickly, pussyish, featherish thing
round his neck, hanging wobblily down in long ends, he looked more
young-lady-like than he will ever feel.
Some courage was needed for the start next day. Things look so different
in the daylight.
"Remember Lord Nithsdale coming out of the Tower," said Alice. "Think of
the great cause and be brave," and she tied his neck up.
"I'm brave all right," said Oswald, "only I do feel such an ass."
"I feel rather an ape myself," Alice owned, "but I've got
three-penn'orth of peppermints to inspire us with bravery. It is called
Dutch courage, I believe."
Owing to our telling Jane we managed to get out unseen by Blakie.
All the others would come, too, in their natural appearance, except that
we made them wash their hands and faces. We happened to be flush of
chink, so we let them come.
"But if you do," Oswald said, "you must surround us in a hollow square
of four."
So they did. And we got down to the station all right. But in the train
there were two ladies who stared, and porters and people like that came
round the window far more than there could be any need for. Oswald's
boots must have shown as he got in. He had forgotten to borrow a pair of
Jane's, as he had meant to, and the ones he had on were his largest. His
ears got hotter and hotter, and it got more and more difficult to manage
his feet and hands. He failed to suck any courage, of any nation, from
the peppermints.
Owing to the state Oswald's ears were now in, we agreed to take a cab at
Cannon Street. We all crammed in somehow, but Oswald saw the driver wink
as he put his boot on the step, and the porter who was opening the cab
door winked back, and I am sorry to say Oswald forgot that he was a
high-born lady, and he told the porter that he had better jolly well
stow his cheek. Then several bystanders began to try and be funny, and
Oswald knew exactly what particular sort of fool he was being.
But he bravely silenced the fierce warnings of his ears, and when we got
to the Editor's address we sent Dick up with a large card that we had
written on,
"MISS DAISY DOLMAN
and
THE RIGHT HONOURABLE MISS
ETHELTRUDA BUSTLER.
On urgent business."
and Oswald kept himself and Alice concealed in the cab till the return
of the messenger.
"All right; you're to go up," Dicky came back and said; "but the boy
grinned who told me so. You'd better be jolly careful."
We bolted like rabbits across the pavement and up the Editor's stairs.
He was very polite. He asked us to sit down, and Oswald did. But first
he tumbled over the front of his dress because it would get under his
boots, and he was afraid to hold it up, not having practised doing this.
"I think I have had letters from you?" said the Editor.
Alice, who looked terrible with the transformation leaning
right-ear-ward, said yes, and that we had come to say what a fine,
bold conception we thought the Doge's chapter was. This was what we
had settled to say, but she needn't have burst out with it like that. I
suppose she forgot herself. Oswald, in the agitation of his clothes,
could say nothing. The elastic of the hat seemed to be very slowly
slipping up the back of his head, and he knew that, if it once passed
the bump that backs of heads are made with, the hat would spring from
his head like an arrow from a bow. And all would be frustrated.
"Yes," said the Editor; "that chapter seems to have had a great
success--a wonderful success. I had no fewer than sixteen letters about
it, all praising it in unmeasured terms." He looked at Oswald's boots,
which Oswald had neglected to cover over with his petticoats. He now did
this.
"It _is_ a nice story, you know," said Alice timidly.
"So it seems," the gentleman went on. "Fourteen of the sixteen letters
bear the Blackheath postmark. The enthusiasm for the chapter would seem
to be mainly local."
Oswald would not look at Alice. He could not trust himself, with her
looking like she did. He knew at once that only the piano-tuner and the
electric bell man had been faithful to their trust. The others had all
posted their letters in the pillar-box just outside our gate. They
wanted to get rid of them as quickly as they could, I suppose.
Selfishness is a vile quality.
The author cannot deny that Oswald now wished he hadn't. The elastic was
certainly moving, slowly, but too surely. Oswald tried to check its
career by swelling out the bump on the back of his head, but he could
not think of the right way to do this.
"I am very pleased to see you," the Editor went on slowly, and there was
something about the way he spoke that made Oswald think of a cat playing
with a mouse. "Perhaps you can tell me. Are there many spiritualists in
Blackheath? Many clairvoyants?"
"Eh?" said Alice, forgetting that that is not the way to behave.
"People who foretell the future?" he said.
"I don't think so," said Alice. "Why?"
His eye twinkled. Oswald saw he had wanted her to ask this.
"Because," said the Editor, more slowly than ever, "I think there must
be. How otherwise can we account for that chapter about the 'Doge's
Home' being read and admired by sixteen different people before it is
even printed. That chapter has not been printed, it has not been
published; it will not be published till the May number of the _People's
Pageant_. Yet in Blackheath sixteen people already appreciate its
subtlety and its realism and all the rest of it. How do you account for
this, Miss Daisy Dolman?"
"I am the Right Honourable Etheltruda," said Alice. "At least--oh, it's
no use going on. We are not what we seem."
"Oddly enough, I inferred that at the very beginning of our interview,"
said the Editor.
Then the elastic finished slipping up Oswald's head at the back, and the
hat leapt from his head exactly as he had known it would. He fielded it
deftly, however, and it did not touch the ground.
"Concealment," said Oswald, "is at an end."
"So it appears," said the Editor. "Well, I hope next time the author of
the 'Golden Gondola' will choose his instruments more carefully."
"He didn't! We aren't!" cried Alice, and she instantly told the Editor
everything.
Concealment being at an end, Oswald was able to get at his trousers
pocket--it did not matter now how many boots he showed--and to get out
Albert's uncle's letter.
Alice was quite eloquent, especially when the Editor had made her take
off the hat with the blue bird, and the transformation and the tail, so
that he could see what she really looked like. He was quite decent when
he really understood how Albert's uncle's threatened marriage must have
upset his brain while he was writing that chapter, and pondering on the
dark future.
He began to laugh then, and kept it up till the hour of parting.
He advised Alice not to put on the transformation and the tail again to
go home in, and she didn't.
Then he said to me: "Are you in a finished state under Miss Daisy
Dolman?" and when Oswald said, "Yes," the Editor helped him to take off
all the womanly accoutrements, and to do them up in brown paper. And he
lent him a cap to go home in.
I never saw a man laugh more. He is an excellent sort.
But no slow passage of years, however many, can ever weaken Oswald's
memory of what those petticoats were like to walk in, and how ripping it
was to get out of them, and have your own natural legs again.
We parted from that Editor without a strain on anybody's character.
He must have written to Albert's uncle, and told him all, for we got a
letter next week. It said--
"MY DEAR KIDDIES,--Art cannot be forced. Nor can
Fame. May I beg you for the future to confine your
exertions to blowing my trumpet--or Fame's--with
your natural voices? Editors may be led, but they
won't be druv. The Right Honourable Miss
Etheltruda Bustler seems to have aroused a deep
pity for me in my Editor's heart. Let that
suffice. And for the future permit me, as firmly
as affectionately, to reiterate the assurance and
the advice which I have so often breathed in your
long young ears, '_I am not ungrateful; but I do
wish you would mind your own business._'"
"That's just because we were found out," said Alice. "If we'd succeeded
he'd have been sitting on the top of the pinnacle of Fame, and he would
have owed it all to us. That would have been making him something like a
wedding present."
What we had really done was to make something very like----but the
author is sure he has said enough.
_THE FLYING LODGER_
FATHER knows a man called Eustace Sandal. I do not know how to express