Short Stories for Children Page 7

The two of them were now descending the hill on the side away from the farm and the church. And they could see not only their carriage standing beneath them, but the evening star had also come into view. There could not be a more peaceful scene – the silver birches around them standing motionless under the deep, pale sky, clothed with their little leaves, and the rabbits at play among the gorse and juniper.

  ‘Bless me, Mum,’ said the old cabman as he opened the carriage door, ‘I was just beginning to think them fairises must have runned away with you and the young lady.’

  Susan burst completely out laughing. ‘Now don’t you think, Grannie,’ she said, ‘that is a very, very, very curious quincidence?’

  * As printed in CSC (1947). First published in Number One Joy Street, Oxford 1923.

  The Thief*

  Once upon a time there lived in a mansion in the Great City of London a Thief. There never was a thief of so much pomp and splendour. He had coaches and carriages – apple-green, cardinal, scarlet, canary and maroon. He had stabling for forty horses – bay, cream, roan, and piebald. He had coachmen and footmen, linkboys, and outriders, white, yellow and black. Of servants to do his bidding there was a multitude. He never even attempted to remember their names. He clapped his hands, and they came; clapped his hands and they went.

  His marbled rooms were crammed to their gilded ceilings with furniture of the utmost magnificence. Money was nought to him. Not only were his plates and dishes, jugs and basins of solid gold, but so were his chair-castors, locks, keys, and bell-pulls; while his warming pans were of purest Thracian silver. There was Gobelin velvet on his floors; there were tapestries of Arras and Bayeux on his walls with the date in each corner, 999. Silken mats from Persia and India, Bangkok and Samarkand beflowered his marble and alabaster staircases.

  As for his Pictures – he had a Siege of Athens fourteen yards by six even in his privy parlour, with frame to match. His cellars were full of wine, his attics – boards to rafters – with sacks of moidores, doubloons, diamonds, rubies, Orient pearls, and Pieces of Eight. There never was such a Thief since the world began, and he lived in his mansion all alone.

  He had a fine constitution, too. He was a square heavy man with a large head and a slight squint in his little green eyes, and he dressed in a velvet doublet and rose-silk hose, like Henry VIII. And having now come to be about sixty years of age, and having stolen everything in the world he thought worth stealing, his one desire was to marry and settle down. He desired to be safe and comfortable and respectable and beloved. Better still, he longed beyond measure for a nursery of children; he wanted to share his ill-gotten gains among them – ten at least: five strapping sons and five lovely flaxen daughters.

  And then perhaps in full season, when he was ninety-nine or a hundred or so, he would die and be buried in an enormous tomb made of a hundred kinds of marble, inlaid with sardonyx, Chrysoprase and chalcedony. And he hoped by that time no one would have the faintest wish to remember where his wicked wealth had come from, he being by then so much beloved. On that day multitudes upon multitudes of mourners – men, women and children – in deepest black, with crape streamers and lilies in their hands, would attend him to his grave. And they would cut out upon his alabaster tomb in gold-filled lettering:

  Here lies at rest in our belief

  Of honourable men the Chief.

  He died respected of men all

  After a Splendid Funeral.

  Just like Enoch Arden, who had never in his long solitary existence stolen a sixpence or even a yam!

  But this of course was only a wicked hope and dream of folly in this Thief’s head. He had many such dreams and he was still alive; and one of them – much more enjoyable than tombstones and funerals – was how to be happy. But it was difficult for such a Thief as he even to be contented. It was difficult for such a Thief as he to be contented because it was impossible for such a Thief to be at ease. He hadn’t a Friend to his name, and more enemies than he could count. He could not even stir out of his house except after dark, or in a thick fog, in case he should be recognized in the streets by someone whom he had robbed. He was therefore compelled to keep within doors all day. His only chance, that is, against being found out was always to stay in.

  Even at night he would sit shivering in his coach on his way to a Ball or a Rout or a Banquet or a Levee or a Ceremony or a Function, with the gold-laced blinds tightly drawn, and his piebald horses heavily caparisoned in ear-nets and flowered velvet and silver tassels, so that nobody should notice their tell-tale spots. And as likely as not he put on a false beard and whiskers.

  All this was second nature to him, but the one thing he could not understand – when lolling on some Persian divan he was safe at home sitting by himself and looking at the exquisite pictures in a beautiful book he had not yet learned to read, or playing over a tune with one finger on his American organ, or biting his nails and looking out of the window at the people walking in the streets, every one of whom was twenty-thousand times at least poorer than his chief footman – there was one thing he could not under stand. Which was why he was not happy.

  At first he supposed it was because he had not yet managed to marry a wife. But then for a Thief as rich as he only a very few wives could be fine enough. It must be a Great Lady. It must be a Lady of Wealth and of Title and of a Family as old as the Pyramids. He had asked all such of these as he could find or be told about, but not a single one would at last say, Yes.

  First there was the Duchess of Anjou and Angelette. She was a duchess absolutely in her own right, with finer manners than a queen, and a nose so aristocratic that it rose up between her eyes like the Duke of Burgundy’s, or like the wing of a seraph in full flight. The Thief sent her a most polite little note, copied out of a Guide to Letter Writing, and inscribed in the most beautiful Italian handwriting by his Writing-Master, Signor Babbinetti. At first the Duchess had said Yes – though not in such few words as that.

  But when her High Chamberlain came to look over the Thief’s mansion, and to count his sacks of diamonds and doubloons, and taste the wine in his cellar, he began to have suspicions. There was a coffer of ivory and ebony in one of the attics with mermaids in gold and silver at the four corners and dolphins with eyes of emerald all round that he seemed to remember to have seen in the Palace of the Emperor of Portugal. And there was a necklet of black duck’s-egg pearls that he knew in his heart had once dangled round the neck of the fair Duchess of Anjou and Angelette herself. And as soon as he had returned home and had refreshed himself with a little sleep after his visit to the Thief’s cellars, the Duchess addressed in the third person another little letter to the Thief, which said not Yes, but a most emphatic No.

  So, too, with the Countess Couterau de Côtelette with the three golden plaits, one of whose ancestors had been King of Troy before Helen was born. Her first faint Yes was also followed by an emphatic No.

  Indeed, the Thief grew more and more dejected and more and more anxious and miserable and angry. One after the other, these noble ladies: next a widowed Marchioness with a wig, and next a dowager Baroness without, and next the stepdaughter of a Baronet, and next the aunt by marriage of a Knight, and so on and on and on – they one and all refused with disdain at last to accept his proffered hand. And it was by no means ever because he squinted or dressed like Henry VIII, but simply because he was no honest man but a Thief.

  After a whole year’s letter-writing the Thief was just as much a bachelor as ever and ten times more unhappy. Indeed news had long since gone abroad of his vain endeavours to find a bride. His neighbours were filled with suspicion; they looked askance at his chimneys; and one by one, leaving their houses vacant and staring, they removed far away out of his society. And ever more and more the vacancy grew about that infamous mansion until at length a newsboy crying the news sounded like the hollow booming of the bittern, and the streets were a desolation. And now, oftentimes, strangers from foreign parts, and peculiar-looking men like pirates and bandits might be seen st
anding and gazing up at his windows from the deserted pavements, only to turn away with a frown of contempt or a sudden grimace.

  And the Thief, peering down and out on them from behind his rich damask curtains, would tremble in his shoes, partly in rage and partly in fear. Yes, he began to be afraid of what might now befall him – what mishap. And he bought yet another twenty red Morocco leather buckets to be filled with water and hung in rows in his gilded marble vestibule in case an enemy should set his house on fire. Moreover, he had three heavy chains hung upon the door, and new locks fitted to all the windows. Why? To keep out Thieves!

  Not only this, but his mind began to be gnawed by remorse. And now and then, especially at Christmastide and on St Valentine’s Day, a great empty van would draw up to the house and would carry away a sack or two of money, with cabinets, and carpets, and pictures and such like, for Christmas gifts and Valentines to people the Thief had never seen. He would not even put his name and address on the packages – but just ‘X from X’. But at last he wearied of copying out the names and addresses of new strangers to send gifts to. And one night a happy thought came to him. With chisel, hammer, and jemmy, he cut away the bars of some of the lower windows and left them wide open to the empty dark in the dead of night.

  And one such dark night, as he sat listening, muffled up in an Arabian shawl, three felons in masks and felt slippers came creeping in through the open windows and began to put treasures into their sacks.

  The Thief rubbed his hands together with a long gentle sigh. ‘Now at last,’ he thought to himself, ‘I shall escape: I shall be free: I will begin again: a new man: I shall be loved for my own sake only.’ And he shivered a little. But alas even as he listened, he heard the first thief say to the second thief, ‘Silas, what have we here?’

  And the third thief said to the first thief, ‘And this, too? Ay me! Oh no! Oh no!’

  And presently, leaving their bulging impious sacks behind them, the three thieves crept out once more through the open window and were swallowed up in the darkness. And the Thief, with his little green squinting eyes, muffled up in his Arabian shawl, knew that these not wholly dishonest men had been utterly ashamed even so much as to have coveted such a bad man’s goods. And for the first time in his wicked life he blushed up to his eyes.

  And so – and so – he grew more and more unhappy, and more and more suspicious and sullen and sly and stupid. He never even dared stir out after dusk had fallen now, and his horses grew so fat over their mangers of wheat and oats and barley that they could scarcely stir in their stables. And at last he sold them one and all – bay and cream, roan and piebald; and he sold his coaches and carriages – apple-green, cardinal, scarlet, canary and maroon. And he dismissed his grooms and coachmen and outriders and linkboys, and his butler and cup-bearer, his three valets and all his servants. And in a few days there was nobody left in that vast mansion but himself. No one at all. He was alone.

  But still he did not know where to turn or what to do to be at peace or in comfort; while the streets and squares around him grew emptier and emptier, and there was scarcely a sound to be heard in his house but the interminable sawing of moths gnawing at his tapestries, mice at his cedarwood, and rats at his butts. His doublet hung looser and looser on his stooping shoulders, his rose-silk hose sagged in folds on his shanks. He hiccoughed whenever he ate or drank. He was a creature almost without hope.

  And one late afternoon, as he sat on his striped marble staircase going down to the Hall, there came a tap. Tap, tap, tap. With his damascened silver-mounted blunderbuss in his left hand, the Thief opened the door on its chain and peered through the crevice.

  ‘Who’s there?’ he said.

  And a voice said, ‘Pity the blind.’

  ‘I didn’t make your eyes,’ muttered the Thief, peering through and clutching tighter his blunderbuss.

  ‘Pity the blind,’ repeated the voice. ‘I starve.’

  And there was a slip of moon standing over the house-tops by whose light the Thief could see the thin, white, trembling eyelids of the blind man and his fallen cheeks. He stared at him a while.

  ‘Wait there,’ he said.

  So, ascending into his empty banqueting hall, he carried down from the table at which he had been sitting and looking at the pictures in the book of Jeremiah – he carried down to the blind man a manchet of white bread and a cup of water. And he thrust the manchet through the crevice of the door into the beggar’s one hand; and the cup of water into the other.

  Whereupon, having drained the cup of water, the blind beggar, shaking there with palsy in the moonlight, inquired if there was anything he could do for the Thief in return for his charity. And the Thief shook a heavy head.

  And the blind beggar, lifting his face in the moonlight, sniffed softly, and cried in a low, still voice, ‘Ay, but I smell the Magic Egg.’

  ‘What’s that?’ cried the Thief sharply.

  ‘Hatched,’ was the reply, ‘it brings happiness!’ And with that the blind beggar turned himself about, and clutching his loaf groped his way down from out of the Thief’s marble porch.

  From that day on, of course, the Thief’s one thought, hope, desire and aim was to find the Magic Egg. From loft to cellar, from roof to drains, he searched his mansion through. There never was such a scene of riot and rummaging and disorder. The contents of a thousand drawers were strewn upon the floor. His sacks of money and jewels were slit from top to bottom and their contents lay glittering and shimmering in heaps in the sunbeams that pierced through his upper windows. He ripped up his ottomans, sawed through his chair-legs, and disembowelled his divans.

  And there was nobody to help, feed, encourage, or watch over him but one puny scullery-maid with eyes black as sloes and a shock of jet-black hair. And why? Simply because she had refused to go. Six times the Thief had barred her out at the area steps, having given her, for fear of being talked about, a fresh week’s wages every time. Yet still for the seventh time, she had managed to creep back again into the mansion, though by what crevice or cranny her master never knew.

  Being accustomed by this time to hearing only the gnawing of the moths and the mice and the rats and the hushing drift of dust in the vacant air, the Thief could distinguish the least little trickle of sound in his mansion at night. So it was that for the seventh time he had found himself creeping downstairs with his candle, only to discover this stubborn creature sitting on the scullery steps with the same old band-box and broken umbrella as before.

  ‘You! you baggage! Why do you keep coming back, when I have told you to go?’ he cried angrily in the doorway. ‘You there! do you hear me? It’s against the law. I shall send for the P—P—P—.’

  But somehow or other the word stuck to the root of his tongue.

  Susan’s black eyes, shining like pools of ink and ebony beneath her mop of jet-black hair, looked up at him from the scullery step. ‘Oh, Master!’ she said. ‘If I go, then you will starve to death, you will. In all my life I never see anyone before so drop away.’

  And the Thief, shivering with cold as he stood in the doorway, could feel at sound of these words how loose his bones were in his body. ‘What’s that to you?’ he said. ‘If I drop away, I drop away. And why should you care?’

  ‘Oh, Master,’ said she, ‘You was less unkind to me than to all the other servants put together, and stay here I must and will, if only to see you comfortably into your coffin.’

  ‘My coffin,’ cried the Thief, staring at her out of an empty face. ‘My coffin!’

  ‘Oh, Master!’ said she, ‘they comes to all, they do.’

  And the Thief, after mumbling and grumbling (for he had never meant to be less unkind to anybody than to everybody) simply because he was too weary and unhappy and restless and befogged in his wits to do anything else, let her stay on.

  ‘Never let me set eyes on you!’ says he; ‘nor hear so much as a sneeze, nor sniff so much as a candlewick. There’s odds and ends in the larder, and there’s water in the cistern.�
�� And once more he returned to his search for the Magic Egg.

  Now early one spring morning, the Thief happened to climb up on top of two gilt chairs in a forgotten lumber room to look over the edge of an old oak fifteenth-century Carnarvonshire wardrobe. It was not an elegant or beautiful or valuable wardrobe, indeed it looked queer and ungainly and ugly standing up there among all the other splendours which that wicked Thief had acquired and discarded in his long active life. But unlike the rest, it was an honest wardrobe, for it had been left to him in her last will and testament in his young and careless days by a Welsh widow-woman. For one bright morning – just such a morning as this – the Thief had been on his way through East Honglingham to see a famous Abbey in those parts in which in old days the Monks had dined off silver dishes that had once belonged to the Grand Khan of Tartary.

  And as in the bright March weather he turned the corner into the village street, he saw over an orchard wall, hanging pegged upon a clothes-line, and spread over the currant and gooseberry-bushes within, a marvellous array of white laundered linen. The sun flashed down on the cherry-trees and plums in full blossom. But fairer, sweeter, whiter yet was this array. Pausing – even on that rapid and dangerous journey – to admire the scene, he had with all his heart exclaimed out loud, ‘My hat and shoe-tags! Now that’s what I call WASHING.’

  Now, by chance the widow-woman herself – her sleeves tucked up to her elbow and a pink print cap on her head – was standing at that moment on the other side of the wall, and she heard these words. She drank them in. And it kindled such burning pleasure in her heart to hear her laundering thus praised by a stranger, that she never forgot him. And when she lay dying, she remembered him yet again. Thus it was that the Thief had acquired this ugly old fifteenth-century Carnarvonshire wardrobe.

  All thought of the widow, however, had vanished completely out of his mind as he clambered heavily up on to the two chairs set one on top of the other that morning in the search that had now grown desperate for the Magic Egg. And as his squinting eyes came over the dog-tooth cornice, they fastened greedily upon a small square wooden box, its top at least an eighth of an inch thick with dust. For on the side of it they had detected in the dim light six scrawled letters: ‘THE EGG’.