Madeline, or, the Deed in the Wood

by E. Nesbit

THIS is all about something we were more sorry for than anything we ever did, and yet the present writer thinks it did more good than harm. But all the same we are sorry because it was not sporting of us, And I say this now, to get it off my chest.

We were quite ready to be friends with Madeline. She was our cousin from India, and we had all seen her picture in a silver frame on Mother’s bedroom mantelpiece; much too pretty to be at all like, we agreed when we knew her.

We live at Yalding. Our house is big and red, with a garden that has a wall round it. It was built when James was King, and that is why it has a flat slab over the front door. I know this sounds silly, but I heard an architect say it, so it must be true.

We did everything we could think of to make things jolly for Madeline. The girls got sunflowers and nasturtiums to put in the room she was to sleep in, and Martin and I picked three of the plums off the greengage-tree that is our own for her. They were not ripe, but that was Madeline’s fault, if anybody’s, for coming before they had time to get soft.

And we sat on the wall in front with the flags that were over from the bazaar, and when the carriage turned in at the gate we waved them and cheered, and then shut the gate, and tore up the drive after the carriage and passed it, and got there first, and cheered again.

Then Mother got out, and we hugged her, and she said, “Wait till I’ve got Madeline out!”

And she got her out. It was like getting a periwinkle out of its shell. She was a skinny little rat, and no mistake, more like a young throstle than anything else, and with a peaky nose that was pink, and clothes that were black, because of a great-uncle she’d never seen, we found out afterwards, and not because of real afflictedness.

We all shook hands with her, and the girls kissed her; but she did not seem to enjoy any of it, and when we said “How are you?” she only sniffed.

I never knew such a kid for sniffing. Mother said it was natural she should be a little downhearted at parting from her mother, and we ought to make allowances, so we made them instantly. But no allowance that ever was allowed would have been enough for the sniffing Madeline. She sniffed at tea and she sniffed at breakfast, she sniffed at the rabbits and the guinea-pigs, and even at the old cat that had got nine kittens in the barn; and the only time she seemed to stop sniffing was when we let her have a ride on the donkey, and then she only stopped to scream “I want to get down—I want to get down—I want to get down!”

So Clifford lifted her off, and then she said I’d pinched her arm, and I hoped I had, though I didn’t mean to. And in the middle of dinner she pointed at me—the eldest son of the house, and incapable of a mean act—and said right out before every one, “He pinched me.”

Mother looked at me, and said, “Oh, Clifford, surely you didn’t?”

Of course, I wasn’t going to be a sneak just because Madeline was, so I said nothing, only looked silent contempt. The others looked silent contempt, too. They understood right enough that their eldest brother hadn’t the kind of nature that stoops to pinch girls, except in play and for their own good.

After dinner we escaped the fell Madeline, and had a comfortable jaw all by ourselves on the top of the stable-yard wall where it is soft with moss. Years later the present author learned from his Mother that Madeline instantly went and blubbered, and said we wouldn’t play with her. But we did not know this baseness at the time.

“She’s a little beast,” said Martin: “she buzzed those plums at my head because they were sour. Didn’t hit me, of course.”

“She’s a fair terror,” Alan said. “She cut open a lot of my cocoons to see what was inside. Duffer that I was to leave them in her bedroom cupboard.”

“She’s an incubator,” said Lotty, who is the youngest.

“She means incubus,” said Olive. But when Clifford asked her what that meant she said she didn’t know; she and Lotty had got it out of a book.

“And it doesn’t matter, anyhow,” she said—just like a girl—“because really whatever else she is she’s the stranger within our gates, and we’ve got to be decent to her. You boys will give her another chance, won’t you?”

“It isn’t chances she wants,” Martin said with gloominess, “it’s manners.”

“It’s all strange to her,” Olive then said, “and I daresay she feels just as uncomfortable as we do.”

Mar said he was sure he hoped so. I said what did she want us to do?

After some jaw it expired, as newspapers say, that she wanted us to take the little sneak fishing.

“Well,” said the present writer, “if we've got to be noble and unselfish, for goodness’ sake let’s be it, and get it over,”

So we went fishing. Our punt is kept tied up to the two old willows at the bottom of the baker’s garden. The baker is a friend of ours, and knows we can be trusted. If you'll believe me that kid pinched seven raspberries before we noticed. I shouldn’t have wondered if no one in Yalding had ever trusted us again. Then we got into the boat, and found a nice likely place down the river, and gave her a rod and baited it, and everything I could think of. And then she said the boat was full of water, and she didn’t like worms!

There wasn’t any water at all in the boat, of course, considering it had been raining for three days. However, with patient politeness we got the boat back, and helped her out and took her home.

When we got quite home and right inside the house she said we might have emptied out the water, and she wanted to go fishing without any worms on the hook!

Clifford told her quite sensibly exactly how silly she was, and that worms were interesting pets and very intelligent. She only said, “You can keep your nasty old wet worms. I want to go fishing without them.”

The girls would have bent before her silliness like stubble in the blast and started fishing again, but Clifford was firm.

“No,” he said, “you must draw the line somewhere. And perhaps this'll be a lesson to her.” So he put the bait tin and tackle on a high shelf in the harness-room, in case the girls should be silly about it, and went off to see a keeper he knows who has a young fox in a hutch. It is quite tame and I like it.

That night when Clifford got into bed his feet touched something soft and cold and wriggly. You will find it hard to believe that any one could be fiend-like, yet so it was. Madeline had somehow contrived to obtain accession to the harness-room shelf, and she had emptied that bait tin into my bed. If it had been some people, girls for instance, they would have screamed and gone raving mad upon the spot. This is a disgusting part of my story, and I hasten to say no more, only pausing to observe that Clifford slept in blankets and there was an imperial row in the morning when the bath was discovered to be full of bait and Clifford’s sheets. But what else was he to do with them, without sneaking, which he is a stranger to?

Clifford was now just about fed-up with Madeline.

But the girls still said how sad being parted from her mother, and poor little thing. This continued till she broke the doll’s teapot lid at a party, and would not say she was sorry. This did for her with Lotty, because it was her teapot.

What she did with his silkworms had settled her hash with Alan, from the first. She was rather friends with Martin for a little bit, but when she had made faces at him at prayers so that he laughed, and then never owned up, though it was bed for him, all was over between them.

Olive was the last to stand up for her. She is as patient as a tortoise generally, but even she gave out after the great Traitor’s Act that sealed the doom of the unamiable Madeline.

You know, of course, that however happy your home may be, and however fond you are of your kind parents, there are some things that you keep to yourself. Our great secret was the roof. No one knew anything about it but us. Clifford's bed was an old-fashioned four-poster, What need to own that he was man enough to have climbed on to the top? There was a trap-door there. It led to the place between the roof and the ceiling. It was a dark passage pointed at the top, and you had to be jolly careful how you walked, or you would have walked through the ceiling below, and all would have been at an end—as far as the roof went. A little way down the passage was a door. It led out on to a square leaded place with a grating in one corner that the rain ran down, and the four roofs of the house rose up like a mountainous range on each side. No one knew that we knew of this. It was our desert island. Oft when missed, and called for till all were hoarse, it was there that we lurked.

One day when Mother and Father were going to a dinner party we decided to have a Brigands’ supper on our island. All was got ready in days and days of secret preparingness. We did not tell the hated Madeline till the last moment—but then we did. It was needful, because she slept in the girls’ room, and she peeped when they told her not to, and thus saw them put their nightgowns on over their clothes. So then she wouldn't go to sleep, and wanted to know why, and sniffed—and the whole plot had to be laid bare.

“I want to come too,” is what the girls say she said.

So they let her.

Rash and fatal act!

When the servants were at supper and all was still, the girls came into our room and with them the snivelling Madeline. We had a very fine feast—pears, apples, gingerbread, a bottle of chutnee, cheese, bread, raspberry vinegar, a bottle of Florence cream, sponge cakes and cinnamon in sticks.

“I couldn’t help it,” Olive told me in a whisper—“she would come.”

Our family are all good climbers—my great-grandfather was at Trafalgar and learned it among the rigging, I believe—and the bedstead was easy to climb, being arranged for the purpose with carved knobs and leaves and things. But Madeline had never had a relation at a Naval engagement. We had to hoist her on to the top of the Tallboys—(a Tallboys is like two chests of drawers on top of each other in case you don’t know)—and then shove her up to the top of the bedstead by main force. And the same with getting her through the trap-door. She was clumsy, but perhaps she was born like that, and we made allowances like Mother had said.

But when she saw the sort of place she had come up into, all cobwebby and plastery, and looking rather ratty by the light of the candle—though really we never saw so much as a mouse there—she began to sniff, and then to cry, and then to scream.

To pop her back through the trap-door was the work of a moment. She fell on the tight-spread damask top of the four-poster. Clifford joined her there, and it was like being in a blanket just before you are tossed. The uncertainness of the damask would not let you stand up. I don’t know how I got her off—but I did, and on to the Tallboys. It’s as easy as winking to get off a Tallboys—you just walk down by the handles. Not so the ill-fated Madeline. She fell from somewhere about the first long drawer of the top set, and I scorn to deny that there was a bump on her head later—really quite as big as a pigeon’s egg. But to hear her howl you'd have thought it was ostrich-egg-size, at least.

Clifford descended like a Greek god from above and got his pillow over her head at the exact moment when Jane knocked at the door with questions about what was up now. Clifford with the greatest presence of mind held the pillow where it was needed, and replied in brave tones:

“Nothing, thank you. I only dropped something.”

This, besides being true, was generous. Because, of course, Clifford would never have dropped Madeline from the top long drawer of a Tallboys unless she, had kicked and scratched so as to make resistance vain. To her Fate, I mean.

Then the others came down, and Clifford took the pillow away, a bit at a time, with earnest promises to put it back if she gave so much as half a sniff. She didn’t.

Then we disappeared, concealing the feast on the other or secret side of the trap-door. The soft balm of slumber then fell on all—even the unworthy Madeline.

You will notice that up to now we had done nothing at all to her except try to be nice.

So it will show you the baseness she was full of at that time when you hear that next morning before breakfast she had told Mother the whole thing, ending up by saying that we had thrown her down on purpose. Mother asked me about it, and I told the plain truth with what is called a sinking heart. The sink proved to be but too true. We were not punished, because of course Mother believed my plain truth, but our secret desert island was taken from us—the trap-door was padlocked, and we were forbidden ever to go up there again!

The feast was not collared: it was judged that we had a right to that because we had bought most of it with our own money—except the chutnee and the Florence cream and the cinnamon—and Mother let us have that too, only telling us to ask next time before we took things out of the store cupboard. The author has sometimes thought that perhaps Mother was young herself once.

We had the feast in the orchard, Mother agreeing to conceal Madeline about her person for the afternoon. It was at that feast that we first dreamed of doing the Deed.

We held an indignation meeting, for so I believe it is called when held in the House of Lords. And we were all agreed that something must be done.

“We can’t have everything muddled up and spoilt like this all our lives,” Martin said.

“And it does make me so angry,” said Olive. “And I hate to be angry. I always feel like a piece of chewed string afterwards,”

The rest of us felt the same, and said it. But it was Clifford who was the first to state that something must be done—a decided deed of some kind.

The question was: what? This gave us food for thought and a good subject for jaw.

Next day Mother took Lotty to stay with our Aunt at Maidstone. Clifford from the round attic window watched the carriage drive away. Our young hero looked dreamily out across the street, and to the left beheld the wooded slopes of Kent, which is sometimes called the garden of England. There is always a moment when the hero looks out over the landscape of whatever county he happens to be born in and the ready tears spring unbidden to his eyes. Nothing sprang to Clifford’s eyes, but an idea sprang to his brain.

Hastily remarking “Got it!” he tore down stairs, found the others, and proposed a picnic in the woods. He unfolded the Deed to each of the others separately, and every time he unfolded it it looked better and brighter. Olive was the only one who didn’t see its betterness and brighterness slap off. But she came round and owned that it might be a lesson to Madeline.

What I am now about to relate looks a jolly sight worse now I am telling it than it did when first thought of while smarting under the yoke of the detested Madeline. It was...

I am getting on too fast.

We had the picnic; we got the tea-basket and cakes and plums and took them in the donkey-cart to the woodiest woods we knew.

Here we had tea—it would have been jolly but for the Deed we had come to that dark wood to do. Olive couldn’t eat anything hardly, but we had to have tea before doing the dark Deed, because we did not want to starve the repelling Madeline as well or ... The author does not seem able to help getting on faster than he wants. I want the Deed to come upon you with a great surprise like it did on the unpopulous Madeline.

“We drove off, leaving Madeline alone ... She looked very small and disagreeable.”

We were very cold with Madeline, and she was beastly grumpy with us. (If she were telling the tale she would put it the other way round. Let us be fair.)

When tea was over there was a silence. Now, when the moment had really come for the Deed, I think we all rather thought perhaps it would be better not. But Madeline sniffed, and her die was cast.

Clifford had been chosen to make the last speech before the execution. He said:

“Madeline, you have been a beast to us ever since you came.”

“Not worse than you’ve been to me,” said Madeline.

Clifford made no reply, but told her all the things she’d done, from buzzing the plums at Martin to putting worms in the snow-white couch of Clifford. She sniffed, but said nothing.

“Did you,” Clifford then said, “ever read ‘Hop o’ my Thumb’?”

She owned she had.

“Well,” said Clifford, “we’re going for a drive, and you can stay and think about Hop o’ my Thumb. Because we’re going to leave you here. See? We've had jolly well enough of you!”

Still she made no reply.

So we put the things in the basket and the basket in the cart. We put the donkey in the cart too.

Then Madeline said: “Auntie said I ought to play tricks and be jolly and try to be more like you. I thought putting worms in beds was just the sort of trick you'd do yourself.”

“It’s not the beastly worms,” said Clifford, “it’s your being such a measly little sneak. Every single thing that happens you go and blab to Mother. You're a tell-tale-tit if ever there was one.”

“Oh, how I hate you!” Madeline then remarked with fury. “I wish you were all dead. I always tell mother everything. And I'll tell her about you. You see if I don’t.”

“You can’t,” said Clifford. “She’s in India.” He does really wish he had not said that. He minds having said that more than anything.

Then we all got into the cart and drove away. Olive had been finishing harnessing the donkey and had not heard our parting words, or, as she told us many times afterwards till we were sick of hearing it, she would never have gone.

We drove off, leaving Madeline alone in her black frock in the green wood. She looked very small and disagreeable, And as we went Alan shouted: “You won't be able to find your way home, like Hop o’ my Thumb did!”

And Martin shouted: “Lost in the wood! Lost in the wood!” till we were out of sight.

Then we put our noble steed to the gallop and drove off. We were silent after that shouting, and the author has since learned that all the others felt exactly as he did, only none of us liked to say so, because we had all agreed beforehand that being lost in a wood would serve Madeline jolly well right, and be a lesson to her, and we did not like to appear milksops in each other's eyes. At least I think that was it. Because now it came to having done the Deed it looked very different, and we went on in an awful silence.

Quite soon, and much sooner than we had meant, Clifford turned our steed’s head and we went back, to find Madeline and explain that it was only a joke, for her own good.

“Do drive fast,” Olive said. “I do wish we hadn’t! Suppose she’s gone mad with terror!”

“Or drowned herself in the pond,” said Martin.

“Or been carried off by bears,” said Alan,

Clifford said, “Don’t talk rot—there aren’t any, and we haven’t been gone half an hour! There hasn’t been time for anything to happen.”

But there had. We got back to the wood, to the place where we had left her. She was not there. We shouted: “Madeline!” and she didn't answer. So then we tied up the steed and went into the wood to look for her.

We could not find her.

We looked all about—among the bracken and hazel and sweet chestnut—and we called and called. The writer got very hot, and then he got very cold, and all the awful things he had read came back to him about people lost in woods, and he felt perfectly sick. He got wilder and wilder in his manner, I believe, and ran all over the wood, which is fortunately small, till there wasn’t a bush he hadn’t looked under, and his hair was sticking to his forehead with apprehensiveness. The others have since confessed it was the same with them. It became evening, and then nearly dark, and at last Clifford coo-eed, and we met, a mangled band of malefactors, by the donkey’s brow.

“Oh,” said Olive, out of breath, “how could we be so awful! Oh, whatever shall we do? Oh, where can she be?”

“People have been hanged for less, I believe,” Martin said.

“But nothing can have happened to her,” Alan would keep saying.

“Something has,” said Clifford. And then the sudden glorious idea occurred to him.

“Perhaps she’s gone home!”

The donkey went back on the wings of the wind instead of in the usual way. I think he was never more surprised in his life.

We tore into the house like a whirlwind in deep anxiety.

All was still as a marble mausoleum. The servants were out in the stable-yard talking to the gardeners.

We searched the house. We thought perhaps she was hiding, to frighten us. But she was not hiding there, for that or any other reason.

Then Mother came home. We do not have supper with her and Father, but in the schoolroom while they have dinner.

In happier days we hated not having meals with them. Now in our despair we were glad of it. We decided that we must tell when we went in to say good-night, because then Mother would say “Where’s Madeline?”

But she never said it, and we were so surprised that we got out of the room without breathing the name of the lost one. I thought Mother looked very odd, somehow, and different.

We went slowly upstairs. On the big landing where the stuffed foxes are we stopped and looked at each other.

“I believe Mother knows,” said Olive.

“Do you think Madeline——”

“If anything has happened to her,” said Martin, “Mother will save us, like a Royalist lady in a book.”

“If anything has happened they wouldn’t know so soon,” said Alan; “it takes days to drag a pond properly, I believe!”

Olive said: “Oh, don’t! I don’t care what you say, I’m going to tell Mother.”

We refused, of course, to allow this. We were all in it, and we weren’t going to let Olive collar any extra let-off for being the first to own up.

So we went down, and a whispered council outside the drawing-room door ended in Clifford, who is the eldest, putting his head in at the door and saying:

“Please, Mother, can we speak to you a minute?”

And she came out directly, like she always does.

Then we told her, standing in the shadow of the hat-stand as much as we could.

I shall not tell you what Mother said. It was said to us, and not to any one else. And besides, though very awful, it wasn’t any worse than what our inside selves had been saying to us for unending hours and hours.

And when it was done Olive caught hold of Mother and shook her—she did really—and cried out: “Oh, yes, Mother—but never mind all that. What do you think’s happened to her? If anything’s happened to her I'll go into a convent—yes, I will.” And with that she loudly howled. Boys do not howl, however criminal, but I know what we felt like. Mother then put her arm round Olive, and uttered the following memorable words:

“There, there! I see you're sorry! Madeline’s all right!”

It then was revealed that Mother had found Madeline in the road crying and kicking her boots in the dust. Mother saw there had been a worse row than usual, so she took the ill-starred Madeline in the carriage to Maidstone, and left her with Aunt Evelyn.

“And you never told us, Mother,” we could not help saying.

“Well, dear,” said Mother, “do you think you deserved to be told—until you asked? But I'll tell you one thing without your asking. Madeline never told of you. I asked if there had been a quarrel, and she said ‘No; she had just missed you in the wood and couldn’t find you.’ It wasn’t true, of course, but I don’t think you can call her a sneak again after that.”

We never have. She came back next day, and the present writer would never have believed he could be so glad to see any sniveller as he was to see Madeline, safe and sound and uninjured by the Deed. The others felt the same.

I have never said so to Mother or any one else, and I am very sorry about the Deed in the Wood, because it was five to one, and most unsportsmanlike, as Father said when it came to his turn to jaw us about it; but I can’t help seeing that what we said and did in that wood instantly made Madeline cease sneaking. Of course I am not quite sure that the speeches would not have been enough without the Deed, but then I am not at all sure that they would.

In the joy of nothing’s having happened to her we were jollier than before to Madeline, I believe. Mother says this made her jollier to us. But I’m not sure about that either. She certainly was jollier.

And somehow we get on all right with her now.

And her sniffs were not intendedness, we have since learned, but hay-fever, which Kings themselves have been subject to, and unable to command.

But suppose there had never been a Deed? Mightn’t she have gone on being a sneak? And us not being jolly to her? The author concludes with a question from the poets: “Who can tell?”

•⁠•⁠•⁠•⁠•⁠•

The life of the human race is full of problems that haven’t got any answers, as the late Euclid has so truly said.