The Railway Children by E. Nesbit (most important books of all time txt) 📖

“I don’t know where anything is.” Mother spoke rather less cheerfully than usual.

He struck a match. There was a candle on the table, and he lighted it. By its thin little glimmer the children saw a large bare kitchen with a stone floor. There were no curtains, no hearth-rug. The kitchen table from home stood in the middle of the room. The chairs were in one corner, and the pots, pans, brooms, and crockery in another. There was no fire, and the black grate showed cold, dead ashes.

As the cart man turned to go out after he had brought in the boxes, there was a rustling, scampering sound that seemed to come from inside the walls of the house.

“Oh, what’s that?” cried the girls.

“It’s only the rats,” said the cart man. And he went away and shut the door, and the sudden draught of it blew out the candle.

“Oh, dear,” said Phyllis, “I wish we hadn’t come!” and she knocked a chair over.

“ONLY the rats!” said Peter, in the dark.

Chapter II. Peter’s coal-mine.

“What fun!” said Mother, in the dark, feeling for the matches on the table. “How frightened the poor mice were—I don’t believe they were rats at all.”

She struck a match and relighted the candle and everyone looked at each other by its winky, blinky light.

“Well,” she said, “you’ve often wanted something to happen and now it has. This is quite an adventure, isn’t it? I told Mrs. Viney to get us some bread and butter, and meat and things, and to have supper ready. I suppose she’s laid it in the dining-room. So let’s go and see.”

The dining-room opened out of the kitchen. It looked much darker than the kitchen when they went in with the one candle. Because the kitchen was whitewashed, but the dining-room was dark wood from floor to ceiling, and across the ceiling there were heavy black beams. There was a muddled maze of dusty furniture—the breakfast-room furniture from the old home where they had lived all their lives. It seemed a very long time ago, and a very long way off.

There was the table certainly, and there were chairs, but there was no supper.

“Let’s look in the other rooms,” said Mother; and they looked. And in each room was the same kind of blundering half-arrangement of furniture, and fire-irons and crockery, and all sorts of odd things on the floor, but there was nothing to eat; even in the pantry there were only a rusty cake-tin and a broken plate with whitening mixed in it.

“What a horrid old woman!” said Mother; “she’s just walked off with the money and not got us anything to eat at all.”

“Then shan’t we have any supper at all?” asked Phyllis, dismayed, stepping back on to a soap-dish that cracked responsively.

“Oh, yes,” said Mother, “only it’ll mean unpacking one of those big cases that we put in the cellar. Phil, do mind where you’re walking to, there’s a dear. Peter, hold the light.”

The cellar door opened out of the kitchen. There were five wooden steps leading down. It wasn’t a proper cellar at all, the children thought, because its ceiling went up as high as the kitchen’s. A bacon-rack hung under its ceiling. There was wood in it, and coal. Also the big cases.

Peter held the candle, all on one side, while Mother tried to open the great packing-case. It was very securely nailed down.

“Where’s the hammer?” asked Peter.

“That’s just it,” said Mother. “I’m afraid it’s inside the box. But there’s a coal-shovel—and there’s the kitchen poker.”

And with these she tried to get the case open.

“Let me do it,” said Peter, thinking he could do it better himself. Everyone thinks this when he sees another person stirring a fire, or opening a box, or untying a knot in a bit of string.

“You’ll hurt your hands, Mammy,” said Roberta; “let me.”

“I wish Father was here,” said Phyllis; “he’d get it open in two shakes. What are you kicking me for, Bobbie?”

“I wasn’t,” said Roberta.

Just then the first of the long nails in the packing-case began to come out with a scrunch. Then a lath was raised and then another, till all four stood up with the long nails in them shining fiercely like iron teeth in the candle-light.

“Hooray!” said Mother; “here are some candles—the very first thing! You girls go and light them. You’ll find some saucers and things. Just drop a little candle-grease in the saucer and stick the candle upright in it.”

“How many shall we light?”

“As many as ever you like,” said Mother, gaily. “The great thing is to be cheerful. Nobody can be cheerful in the dark except owls and dormice.”

So the girls lighted candles. The head of the first match flew off and stuck to Phyllis’s finger; but, as Roberta said, it was only a little burn, and she might have had to be a Roman martyr and be burned whole if she had happened to live in the days when those things were fashionable.

Then, when the dining-room was lighted by fourteen candles, Roberta fetched coal and wood and lighted a fire.

“It’s very cold for May,” she said, feeling what a grown-up thing it was to say.

The fire-light and the candle-light made the dining-room look very different, for now you could see that the dark walls were of wood, carved here and there into little wreaths and loops.

The girls hastily ‘tidied’ the room, which meant putting the chairs against the wall, and piling all the odds and ends into a corner and partly hiding them with the big leather armchair that Father used to sit in after dinner.

“Bravo!” cried Mother, coming in with a tray full of things. “This is something like! I’ll just get a tablecloth and then—”

The tablecloth was in a box with a proper lock that was opened with a key and not with a shovel, and when the cloth was spread on the table, a real feast was laid out on it.

Everyone was very, very tired, but everyone cheered up at the sight of the funny and delightful supper. There were biscuits, the Marie and the plain kind, sardines, preserved ginger, cooking raisins, and candied peel and marmalade.

“What a good thing Aunt Emma packed up all the odds and ends out of the Store cupboard,” said Mother. “Now, Phil, DON’T put the marmalade spoon in among the sardines.”

“No, I won’t, Mother,” said Phyllis, and put it down among the Marie biscuits.

“Let’s drink Aunt Emma’s health,” said Roberta, suddenly; “what should we have done if she hadn’t packed up these things? Here’s to Aunt Emma!”

And the toast was drunk in ginger wine and water, out of willow-patterned tea-cups, because the glasses couldn’t be found.

They all felt that they had been a little hard on Aunt Emma. She wasn’t a nice cuddly person like Mother, but after all it was she who had thought of packing up the odds and ends of things to eat.

It was Aunt Emma, too, who had aired all the sheets ready; and the men who had moved the furniture had put the bedsteads together, so the beds were soon made.

“Good night, chickies,” said Mother. “I’m sure there aren’t any rats. But I’ll leave my door open, and then if a mouse comes, you need only scream, and I’ll come and tell it exactly what I think of it.”

Then she went to her own room. Roberta woke to hear the little travelling clock chime two. It sounded like a church clock ever so far away, she always thought. And she heard, too, Mother still moving about in her room.

Next morning Roberta woke Phyllis by pulling her hair gently, but quite enough for her purpose.

“Wassermarrer?” asked Phyllis, still almost wholly asleep.

“Wake up! wake up!” said Roberta. “We’re in the new house—don’t you remember? No servants or anything. Let’s get up and begin to be useful. We’ll just creep down mouse-quietly, and have everything beautiful before Mother gets up. I’ve woke Peter. He’ll be dressed as soon as we are.”

So they dressed quietly and quickly. Of course, there was no water in their room, so when they got down they washed as much as they thought was necessary under the spout of the pump in the yard. One pumped and the other washed. It was splashy but interesting.

“It’s much more fun than basin washing,” said Roberta. “How sparkly the weeds are between the stones, and the moss on the roof—oh, and the flowers!”

The roof of the back kitchen sloped down quite low. It was made of thatch and it had moss on it, and house-leeks and stonecrop and wallflowers, and even a clump of purple flag-flowers, at the far corner.

“This is far, far, far and away prettier than Edgecombe Villa,” said Phyllis. “I wonder what the garden’s like.”

“We mustn’t think of the garden yet,” said Roberta, with earnest energy. “Let’s go in and begin to work.”

They lighted the fire and put the kettle on, and they arranged the crockery for breakfast; they could not find all the right things, but a glass ash-tray made an excellent salt-cellar, and a newish baking-tin seemed as if it would do to put bread on, if they had any.

When there seemed to be nothing more that they could do, they went out again into the fresh bright morning.

“We’ll go into the garden now,” said Peter. But somehow they couldn’t find the garden. They went round the house and round the house. The yard occupied the back, and across it were stables and outbuildings. On the other three sides the house stood simply in a field, without a yard of garden to divide it from the short smooth turf. And yet they had certainly seen the garden wall the night before.

It was a hilly country. Down below they could see the line of the railway, and the black yawning mouth of a tunnel. The station was out of sight. There was a great bridge with tall arches running across one end of the valley.

“Never mind the garden,” said Peter; “let’s go down and look at the railway. There might be trains passing.”

“We can see them from here,” said Roberta, slowly; “let’s sit down a bit.”

So they all sat down on a great flat grey stone that had pushed itself up out of the grass; it was one of many that lay about on the hillside, and when Mother came out to look for them at eight o’clock, she found them deeply asleep in a contented, sun-warmed bunch.

They had made an excellent fire, and had set the kettle on it at about half-past five. So that by eight the fire had been out for some time, the water had all boiled away, and the bottom was burned out of the kettle. Also they had not thought of washing the crockery before they set the table.

“But it doesn’t matter—the cups and saucers, I mean,” said Mother. “Because I’ve found another room—I’d quite forgotten there was one. And it’s magic! And I’ve boiled the water for tea in a saucepan.”

The forgotten room opened out of the kitchen. In the agitation and half darkness the night before its door had been mistaken for a cupboard’s. It was a little square room, and on its table, all nicely set out, was a joint of cold roast beef, with bread, butter, cheese, and a pie.

“Pie for breakfast!” cried Peter; “how perfectly ripping!”

“It isn’t pigeon-pie,” said Mother; “it’s only apple. Well, this is the supper we ought to have had last night. And there was a note from Mrs. Viney. Her son-in-law has broken his arm, and she had to get home early. She’s