The Enchanted Castle - E. Nesbit (best novels to read for students TXT) 📗

and limp hands⁠—could have managed, by just being alive, to become perfectly respectable, apparently about fifty years old, and obviously well known and respected in his own suburb⁠—the kind of man who travels first class and smokes expensive cigars. Gerald knew this time, without need of repetition, that the Ugly-Wugly had said:

“Knock ’em up.”

“You can’t,” Gerald explained; “they’re all stone deaf⁠—every single person who keeps a hotel in this town. It’s⁠—” he wildly plunged⁠—“it’s a County Council law. Only deaf people are allowed to keep hotels. It’s because of the hops in the beer,” he found himself adding; “you know, hops are so good for earache.”

“I o wy ollo oo,” said the respectable Ugly-Wugly; and Gerald was not surprised to find that the thing did “not quite follow him.”

“It is a little difficult at first,” he said. The other Ugly-Wuglies were crowding round. The lady in the poke bonnet said⁠—Gerald found he was getting quite clever at understanding the conversation of those who had no roofs to their mouths:

“If not a hotel, a lodging.”

“My lodging is on the cold ground,” sang itself unbidden and unavailing in Gerald’s ear. Yet stay⁠—was it unavailing?

“I do know a lodging,” he said slowly, “but⁠—” The tallest of the Ugly-Wuglies pushed forward. He was dressed in the old brown overcoat and top-hat which always hung on the school hatstand to discourage possible burglars by deluding them into the idea that there was a gentleman-of-the-house, and that he was at home. He had an air at once more sporting and less reserved than that of the first speaker, and anyone could see that he was not quite a gentleman.

“Wa I wo oo oh,” he began, but the lady Ugly-Wugly in the flower-wreathed hat interrupted him. She spoke more distinctly than the others, owing, as Gerald found afterwards, to the fact that her mouth had been drawn open, and the flap cut from the aperture had been folded back so that she really had something like a roof to her mouth, though it was only a paper one.

“What I want to know,” Gerald understood her to say, “is where are the carriages we ordered?”

“I don’t know,” said Gerald, “but I’ll find out. But we ought to be moving,” he added; “you see, the performance is over, and they want to shut up the house and put the lights out. Let’s be moving.”

“Eh ech e oo-ig,” repeated the respectable Ugly-Wugly, and stepped towards the front door.

“Oo um oo,” said the flower-wreathed one; and Gerald assures me that her vermilion lips stretched in a smile.

“I shall be delighted,” said Gerald with earnest courtesy, “to do anything, of course. Things do happen so awkwardly when you least expect it. I could go with you, and get you a lodging, if you’d only wait a few moments in the⁠—in the yard. It’s quite a superior sort of yard,” he went on, as a wave of surprised disdain passed over their white paper faces⁠—“not a common yard, you know; the pump,” he added madly, “has just been painted green all over, and the dustbin is enamelled iron.”

The Ugly-Wuglies turned to each other in consultation, and Gerald gathered that the greenness of the pump and the enamelled character of the dustbin made, in their opinion, all the difference.

“I’m awfully sorry,” he urged eagerly, “to have to ask you to wait, but you see I’ve got an uncle who’s quite mad, and I have to give him his gruel at half-past nine. He won’t feed out of any hand but mine.” Gerald did not mind what he said. The only people one is allowed to tell lies to are the Ugly-Wuglies; they are all clothes and have no insides, because they are not human beings, but only a sort of very real visions, and therefore cannot be really deceived, though they may seem to be.

Through the back door that has the blue, yellow, red, and green glass in it, down the iron steps into the yard, Gerald led the way, and the Ugly-Wuglies trooped after him. Some of them had boots, but the ones whose feet were only broomsticks or umbrellas found the openwork iron stairs very awkward.

“If you wouldn’t mind,” said Gerald, “just waiting under the balcony? My uncle is so very mad. If he were to see⁠—see any strangers I mean, even aristocratic ones⁠—I couldn’t answer for the consequences.”

“Perhaps,” said the flower-hatted lady nervously, “it would be better for us to try and find a lodging ourselves?”

“I wouldn’t advise you to,” said Gerald as grimly as he knew how; “the police here arrest all strangers. It’s the new law the Liberals have just made,” he added convincingly, “and you’d get the sort of lodging you wouldn’t care for⁠—I couldn’t bear to think of you in a prison dungeon,” he added tenderly.

“I ah wi oo er papers,” said the respectable Ugly-Wugly, and added something that sounded like “disgraceful state of things.”

However, they ranged themselves under the iron balcony. Gerald gave one last look at them and wondered, in his secret heart, why he was not frightened, though in his outside mind he was congratulating himself on his bravery. For the things did look rather horrid. In that light it was hard to believe that they were really only clothes and pillows and sticks⁠—with no insides. As he went up the steps he heard them talking among themselves in that strange language of theirs, all oo’s and ah’s; and he thought he distinguished the voice of the respectable Ugly-Wugly saying, “Most gentlemanly lad,” and the wreathed-hatted lady answering warmly: “Yes, indeed.”

The coloured-glass door closed behind him. Behind him was the yard, peopled by seven impossible creatures. Before him lay the silent house, peopled, as he knew very well, by five human beings as frightened as human beings could be. You think, perhaps, that Ugly-Wuglies are nothing to be frightened of. That’s only because you have never seen one come alive. You must make one⁠—any old suit of your father’s, and a hat that he