Five Children and It - E. Nesbit (best sales books of all time .txt) 📗

and yet soft, which biscuits ought not to be. But the ginger-beer made up for everything.

“It’s my turn now to try to buy something with the money,” Anthea said; “I’m next eldest. Where is the pony-cart kept?”

It was at The Chequers, and Anthea went in the back way to the yard, because they all knew that little girls ought not to go into the bars of public houses. She came out, as she herself said, “pleased but not proud.”

“He’ll be ready in a brace of shakes, he says,” she remarked, “and he’s to have one sovereign⁠—or whatever it is⁠—to drive us in to Rochester and back, besides waiting there till we’ve got everything we want. I think I managed very well.”

“You think yourself jolly clever, I daresay,” said Cyril moodily. “How did you do it?”

“I wasn’t jolly clever enough to go taking handfuls of money out of my pocket, to make it seem cheap, anyway,” she retorted. “I just found a young man doing something to a horse’s leg with a sponge and a pail. And I held out one sovereign, and I said⁠—‘Do you know what this is?’ He said ‘No,’ and he’d call his father. And the old man came, and he said it was a spade guinea; and he said was it my own to do as I liked with, and I said ‘Yes’; and I asked about the pony-cart, and I said he could have the guinea if he’d drive us in to Rochester. And his name is S. Crispin. And he said, ‘Right oh.’ ”

It was a new sensation to be driven in a smart pony-trap along pretty country roads; it was very pleasant too (which is not always the case with new sensations), quite apart from the beautiful plans of spending the money which each child made as they went along, silently of course and quite to itself, for they felt it would never have done to let the old innkeeper hear them talk in the affluent sort of way they were thinking in. The old man put them down by the bridge at their request.

“If you were going to buy a carriage and horses, where would you go?” asked Cyril, as if he were only asking for the sake of something to say.

“Billy Peasemarsh, at the Saracen’s Head,” said the old man promptly. “Though all forbid I should recommend any man where it’s a question of horses, no more than I’d take anybody else’s recommending if I was a-buying one. But if your pa’s thinking of a turnout of any sort, there ain’t a straighter man in Rochester, nor a civiller spoken, than Billy, though I says it.”

“Thank you,” said Cyril. “The Saracen’s Head.”

And now the children began to see one of the laws of nature turn upside down and stand on its head like an acrobat. Any grown-up person would tell you that money is hard to get and easy to spend. But the fairy money had been easy to get, and spending it was not only hard, it was almost impossible. The tradespeople of Rochester seemed to shrink, to a tradesperson, from the glittering fairy gold (“furrin money” they called it, for the most part). To begin with, Anthea, who had had the misfortune to sit on her hat earlier in the day, wished to buy another. She chose a very beautiful one, trimmed with pink roses and the blue breasts of peacocks. It was marked in the window, “Paris Model, three guineas.”

“I’m glad,” she said, “because, if it says guineas, it means guineas, and not sovereigns, which we haven’t got.”

But when she took three of the spade guineas in her hand, which was by this time rather dirty owing to her not having put on gloves before going to the gravel-pit, the black-silk young lady in the shop looked very hard at her, and went and whispered something to an older and uglier lady, also in black silk, and then they gave her back the money and said it was not current coin.

“It’s good money,” said Anthea, “and it’s my own.”

“I daresay,” said the lady, “but it’s not the kind of money that’s fashionable now, and we don’t care about taking it.”

“I believe they think we’ve stolen it,” said Anthea, rejoining the others in the street; “if we had gloves they wouldn’t think we were so dishonest. It’s my hands being so dirty fills their minds with doubts.”

So they chose a humble shop, and the girls bought cotton gloves, the kind at sixpence three-farthings, but when they offered a guinea the woman looked at it through her spectacles and said she had no change; so the gloves had to be paid for out of Cyril’s two-and-sevenpence that he meant to buy rabbits with, and so had the green imitation crocodile-skin purse at ninepence halfpenny which had been bought at the same time. They tried several more shops, the kinds where you buy toys and scent, and silk handkerchiefs and books, and fancy boxes of stationery, and photographs of objects of interest in the vicinity. But nobody cared to change a guinea that day in Rochester, and as they went from shop to shop they got dirtier and dirtier, and their hair got more and more untidy, and Jane slipped and fell down on a part of the road where a water-cart had just gone by. Also they got very hungry, but they found no one would give them anything to eat for their guineas. After trying two pastrycooks in vain, they became so hungry, perhaps from the smell of the cake in the shops, as Cyril suggested, that they formed a plan of campaign in whispers and carried it out in desperation. They marched into a third pastrycook’s⁠—Beale his name was⁠—and before the people behind the counter could interfere each child had seized three new penny buns, clapped the three together between its dirty hands, and taken a big bite out of the triple sandwich. Then they stood at bay, with