The Wouldbegoods: Being the Further Adventures of the Treasure Seekers by E. Nesbit (best books to read TXT) 📗

Alice gave her back the card. She had held on to the woman’s hand all the time, and now she squeezed the hand, and held it against her face. But she could not say a word because she was crying so. The soldier’s mother took the card again and she pushed Alice away, but it was not an unkind push, and she went in and shut the door; and as Alice and Oswald went down the road Oswald looked back, and one of the windows of the cottage had a white blind. Afterwards the other windows had too. There were no blinds really to the cottage. It was aprons and things she had pinned up.

Alice cried most of the morning, and so did the other girls. We wanted to do something for the soldier’s mother, but you can do nothing when people’s sons are shot. It is the most dreadful thing to want to do something for people who are unhappy, and not to know what to do.

It was Noel who thought of what we COIULD do at last.

He said, ‘I suppose they don’t put up tombstones to soldiers when they die in war. But there—I mean Oswald said, ‘Of course not.’

Noel said, ‘I daresay you’ll think it’s silly, but I don’t care. Don’t you think she’d like it, if we put one up to HIM? Not in the churchyard, of course, because we shouldn’t be let, but in our garden, just where it joins on to the churchyard?’

And we all thought it was a first-rate idea.

This is what we meant to put on the tombstone:

‘Here lies BILL SIMPKINS Who died fighting for Queen and Country.’ ‘A faithful son, A son so dear, A soldier brave Lies buried here.’

Then we remembered that poor brave Bill was really buried far away in the Southern hemisphere, if at all. So we altered it to—

‘A soldier brave We weep for here.’

Then we looked out a nice flagstone in the stable-yard, and we got a cold chisel out of the Dentist’s toolbox, and began.

But stone-cutting is difficult and dangerous work.

Oswald went at it a bit, but he chipped his thumb, and it bled so he had to chuck it. Then Dicky tried, and then Denny, but Dicky hammered his finger, and Denny took all day over every stroke, so that by tea-time we had only done the H, and about half the E—and the E was awfully crooked. Oswald chipped his thumb over the H.

We looked at it the next morning, and even the most sanguinary of us saw that it was a hopeless task.

Then Denny said, ‘Why not wood and paint?’ and he showed us how. We got a board and two stumps from the carpenter’s in the village, and we painted it all white, and when that was dry Denny did the words on it.

It was something like this:

‘IN MEMORY OF BILL SIMPKINS DEAD FOR QUEEN AND COUNTRY. HONOUR TO HIS NAME AND ALL OTHER BRAVE SOLDIERS.’

We could not get in what we meant to at first, so we had to give up the poetry.

We fixed it up when it was dry. We had to dig jolly deep to get the posts to stand up, but the gardener helped us.

Then the girls made wreaths of white flowers, roses and Canterbury bells, and lilies and pinks, and sweet-peas and daisies, and put them over the posts. And I think if Bill Simpkins had known how sorry we were, he would have been glad. Oswald only hopes if he falls on the wild battlefield, which is his highest ambition, that somebody will be as sorry about him as he was about Bill, that’s all!

When all was done, and what flowers there were over from the wreaths scattered under the tombstone between the posts, we wrote a letter to Mrs Simpkins, and said—

DEAR MRS SIMPKINS—

We are very, very sorry about the turnips and things, and we beg your pardon humbly. We have put up a tombstone to your brave son.

And we signed our names. Alice took the letter.

The soldier’s mother read it, and said something about our oughting to know better than to make fun of people’s troubles with our tombstones and tomfoolery.

Alice told me she could not help crying.

She said—

‘It’s not! it’s NOT! Dear, DEAR Mrs Simpkins, do come with me and see! You don’t know how sorry we are about Bill. Do come and see.

We can go through the churchyard, and the others have all gone in, so as to leave it quiet for you. Do come.’

And Mrs Simpkins did. And when she read what we had put up, and Alice told her the verse we had not had room for, she leant against the wall by the grave—I mean the tombstone—and Alice hugged her, and they both cried bitterly. The poor soldier’s mother was very, very pleased, and she forgave us about the turnips, and we were friends after that, but she always liked Alice the best. A great many people do, somehow.

After that we used to put fresh flowers every day on Bill’s tombstone, and I do believe his mother was pleased, though she got us to move it away from the churchyard edge and put it in a corner of our garden under a laburnum, where people could not see it from the church. But you could from the road, though I think she thought you couldn’t. She came every day to look at the new wreaths. When the white flowers gave out we put coloured, and she liked it just as well.

About a fortnight after the erecting of the tombstone the girls were putting fresh wreaths on it when a soldier in a red coat came down the road, and he stopped and looked at us. He walked with a stick, and he had a bundle in a blue cotton handkerchief, and one arm in a sling.

And he looked again, and he came nearer, and he leaned on the wall, so that he could read the black printing on the white paint.

And he grinned all over his face, and he said—

‘Well, I AM blessed!’

And he read it all out in a sort of half whisper, and when he came to the end, where it says, ‘and all such brave soldiers’, he said—

‘Well, I really AM!’ I suppose he meant he really was blessed. Oswald thought it was like the soldier’s cheek, so he said—

‘I daresay you aren’t so very blessed as you think. What’s it to do with you, anyway, eh, Tommy?’