It really was not such a bad baby—for a baby. Its face was round and quite clean, which babies’ faces are not always, as I daresay you know by your own youthful relatives; and Dora said its cape was trimmed with real lace, whatever that may be—I don’t see myself how one kind of lace can be realler than another. It was in a very swagger sort of perambulator when we saw it; and the perambulator was standing quite by itself in the lane that leads to the mill.
‘I wonder whose baby it is,’ Dora said. ‘Isn’t it a darling, Alice?’
Alice agreed to its being one, and said she thought it was most likely the child of noble parents stolen by gipsies.
‘These two, as likely as not,’ Noel said. ‘Can’t you see something crime-like in the very way they’re lying?’
They were two tramps, and they were lying on the grass at the edge of the lane on the shady side fast asleep, only a very little further on than where the Baby was. They were very ragged, and their snores did have a sinister sound.
‘I expect they stole the titled heir at dead of night, and they’ve been travelling hot-foot ever since, so now they’re sleeping the sleep of exhaustedness,’ Alice said. ‘What a heart-rending scene when the patrician mother wakes in the morning and finds the infant aristocrat isn’t in bed with his mamma.’
The Baby was fast asleep or else the girls would have kissed it. They are strangely fond of kissing. The author never could see anything in it himself.
‘If the gipsies DID steal it,’ Dora said ‘perhaps they’d sell it to us. I wonder what they’d take for it.’
‘What could you do with it if you’d got it?’ H. O. asked.
‘Why, adopt it, of course,’ Dora said. ‘I’ve often thought I should enjoy adopting a baby. It would be a golden deed, too. We’ve hardly got any in the book yet.’
‘I should have thought there were enough of us,’ Dicky said.
‘Ah, but you’re none of you babies,’ said Dora.
‘Unless you count H. O. as a baby: he behaves jolly like one sometimes.’
This was because of what had happened that morning when Dicky found H. O. going fishing with a box of worms, and the box was the one Dicky keeps his silver studs in, and the medal he got at school, and what is left of his watch and chain. The box is lined with red velvet and it was not nice afterwards. And then H. O. said Dicky had hurt him, and he was a beastly bully, and he cried. We thought all this had been made up, and were sorry to see it threaten to break out again. So Oswald said—
‘Oh, bother the Baby! Come along, do!’
And the others came.
We were going to the miller’s with a message about some flour that hadn’t come, and about a sack of sharps for the pigs.
After you go down the lane you come to a clover-field, and then a cornfield, and then another lane, and then it is the mill. It is a jolly fine mill: in fact it is two—water and wind ones—one of each kind—with a house and farm buildings as well. I never saw a mill like it, and I don’t believe you have either.
If we had been in a story-book the miller’s wife would have taken us into the neat sanded kitchen where the old oak settle was black with time and rubbing, and dusted chairs for us—old brown Windsor chairs—and given us each a glass of sweet-scented cowslip wine and a thick slice of rich home-made cake. And there would have been fresh roses in an old china bowl on the table. As it was, she asked us all into the parlour and gave us Eiffel Tower lemonade and Marie biscuits. The chairs in her parlour were ‘bent wood’, and no flowers, except some wax ones under a glass shade, but she was very kind, and we were very much obliged to her. We got out to the miller, though, as soon as we could; only Dora and Daisy stayed with her, and she talked to them about her lodgers and about her relations in London.
The miller is a MAN. He showed us all over the mills—both kinds—and let us go right up into the very top of the wind-mill, and showed us how the top moved round so that the sails could catch the wind, and the great heaps of corn, some red and some yellow (the red is English wheat), and the heaps slice down a little bit at a time into a square hole and go down to the mill-stones. The corn makes a rustling soft noise that is very jolly—something like the noise of the sea—and you can hear it through all the other mill noises.
Then the miller let us go all over the water-mill. It is fairy palaces inside a mill. Everything is powdered over white, like sugar on pancakes when you are allowed to help yourself. And he opened a door and showed us the great water-wheel working on slow and sure, like some great, round, dripping giant, Noel said, and then he asked us if we fished.
‘Yes,’ was our immediate reply.
‘Then why not try the mill-pool?’ he said, and we replied politely; and when he was gone to tell his man something we owned to each other that he was a trump.
He did the thing thoroughly. He took us out and cut us ash saplings for rods; he found us in lines and hooks, and several different sorts of bait, including a handsome handful of meal-worms, which Oswald put loose in his pocket.
When it came to bait, Alice said she was going home with Dora and Daisy. Girls are strange, mysterious, silly things. Alice always enjoys a rat hunt until the rat is caught, but she hates fishing from beginning to end. We boys have got to like it. We don’t feel now as we did when we turned off the water and stopped the competition of the competing anglers. We had a grand day’s fishing that day. I can’t think what made the miller so kind to us. Perhaps he felt a thrill of fellow-feeling in his manly breast for his fellow-sportsmen, for he was a noble fisherman himself.
We had glorious sport—eight roach, six dace, three eels, seven perch, and a young pike, but he was so very young the miller asked us to put him back, and of course we did. ‘He’ll live to bite another day,’ said the miller.
The miller’s wife gave us bread and cheese and more Eiffel Tower lemonade, and we went home at last, a little damp, but full of successful ambition, with our fish on a string.
It had been a strikingly good time—one of those times that happen in the country quite by themselves. Country people are much more friendly than town people. I suppose they don’t have to spread their friendly feelings out over so many persons, so it’s thicker, like a pound of butter on one loaf is thicker than on a dozen. Friendliness in the country is not scrape, like it is in London. Even Dicky and H. O. forgot the affair of honour that had taken place in the morning. H. O. changed rods with Dicky because H. O.‘s was the best rod, and Dicky baited H. O.‘s hook for him, just like loving, unselfish brothers in Sunday School magazines.
We were talking fishlikely as we went along down the lane and through the cornfield and the cloverfield, and then we came to the other lane where we had seen the Baby. The tramps were gone, and the perambulator was gone, and, of course, the Baby was gone too.
‘I wonder if those gipsies HAD stolen the Baby?’ Noel said dreamily. He had not fished much, but he had made a piece of poetry. It was this:
‘How I wish
I was a fish.
I would not look
At your hook,
But lie still and be cool
At the bottom of the pool
And when you went to look
At your cruel hook,
You would not find me there,
So there!’
‘If they did steal the Baby,’ Noel went on, ‘they will be tracked by the lordly perambulator. You can disguise a baby in rags and walnut juice, but there isn’t any disguise dark enough to conceal a perambulator’s person.’
‘You might disguise it as a wheel-barrow,’ said Dicky.
‘Or cover it with leaves,’ said H. O., ‘like the robins.’
We told him to shut up and not gibber, but afterwards we had to own that even a young brother may sometimes talk sense by accident.
For we took the short cut home from the lane—it begins with a large gap in the hedge and the grass and weeds trodden down by the hasty feet of persons who were late for church and in too great a hurry to go round by the road. Our house is next to the church, as I think I have said before, some time.
The short cut leads to a stile at the edge of a bit of wood (the Parson’s Shave, they call it, because it belongs to him). The wood has not been shaved for some time, and it has grown out beyond the stile and here, among the hazels and chestnuts and young dogwood bushes, we saw something white. We felt it was our duty to investigate, even if the white was only the under side of the tail of a dead rabbit caught in a trap.
It was not—it was part of the perambulator. I forget whether I said that the perambulator was enamelled white—not the kind of enamelling you do at home with Aspinall’s and the hairs of the brush come out and it is gritty-looking, but smooth, like the handles of ladies very best lace parasols. And whoever had abandoned the helpless perambulator in that lonely spot had done exactly as H. O. said, and covered it with leaves, only they were green and some of them had dropped off.
The others were wild with excitement. Now or never, they thought, was a chance to be real detectives. Oswald alone retained a calm exterior. It was he who would not go straight to the police station.
He said: ‘Let’s try and ferret out something for ourselves before we tell the police. They always have a clue directly they hear about the finding of the body. And besides, we might as well let Alice be in anything there is going. And besides, we haven’t had our dinners yet.’
This argument of Oswald’s was so strong and powerful—his arguments are often that, as I daresay you have noticed—that the others agreed. It was Oswald, too, who showed his artless brothers why they had much better not take the deserted perambulator home with them.
‘The dead body, or whatever the clue is, is always left exactly as it is found,’ he said, ‘till the police have seen it, and the coroner, and the inquest, and the doctor, and the sorrowing relations. Besides, suppose someone saw us with the beastly thing, and thought we had stolen it; then they would say, “What have you done with the Baby?” and then where should we be?’ Oswald’s brothers could not answer this question, but once more Oswald’s native eloquence and far-seeing discerningness conquered.
‘Anyway,’ Dicky said, ‘let’s shove the derelict a little further under cover.’
So we did.
Then we went on home. Dinner was ready and so were Alice and Daisy, but Dora was not there.
‘She’s got a—well, she’s not coming to dinner anyway,’ Alice said when we asked. ‘She can tell you herself afterwards what it is she’s got.’
Oswald thought it was headache, or pain in the temper, or in the pinafore, so he said no more, but as soon as Mrs Pettigrew had helped us and left the room he began the thrilling tale of the forsaken perambulator. He told it with the greatest thrillingness anyone could have, but Daisy and Alice seemed almost unmoved. Alice said—
‘Yes, very strange,’ and things like that, but both the girls seemed to be thinking of something else. They kept looking at each other and trying not to laugh, so Oswald saw they had got some silly secret and he said—
‘Oh, all right! I don’t care about telling you. I only thought you’d like to be in it. It’s going to be a really big thing, with policemen in it, and perhaps a judge.’
‘In what?’ H. O. said; ‘the perambulator?’
Daisy choked and then tried to drink, and spluttered and got purple, and had to be thumped on the back. But Oswald was not appeased. When Alice said, ‘Do go on, Oswald. I’m sure we all like it very much,’ he said—
‘Oh, no, thank you,’ very politely. ‘As it happens,’ he went on, ‘I’d just as soon go through with this thing without having any girls in it.’
‘In the perambulator?’ said H. O. again.
‘It’s a man’s job,’ Oswald went on, without taking any notice of H. O.
‘Do you really think so,’ said Alice, ‘when there’s a baby in it?’
‘But there isn’t,’ said H. O., ‘if you mean in the perambulator.’
‘Blow you and your perambulator,’ said Oswald, with gloomy forbearance.
Alice kicked Oswald under the table and said—
‘Don’t be waxy, Oswald. Really and truly Daisy and I HAVE got a secret, only it’s Dora’s secret, and she wants to tell you herself. If it was mine or............