Oswald Bastable and Others

Excerpt

AN OBJECT OF VALUE AND VIRTUE

This happened a very little time after we left our humble home in Lewisham, and went to live at the Blackheath house of our Indian uncle, which was replete with every modern convenience, and had a big garden and a great many greenhouses. We had had a lot of jolly Christmas presents, and one of them was Dicky's from father, and it was a printing-press. Not one of the eighteenpenny kind that never come off, but a real tip-topper, that you could have printed a whole newspaper out of if you could have been clever enough to make up all the stuff there is in newspapers. I don't know how people can do it. It's all about different things, but it is all just the same too. But the author is sorry to find he is not telling things from the beginning, as he has been taught. The printing-press really doesn't come into the story till quite a long way on. So it is no use your wondering what it was that we did print with the printing-press. It was not a newspaper, anyway, and it wasn't my young brother's poetry, though he and the girls did do an awful lot of that. It was something much more far-reaching, as you will see if you wait.

There wasn't any skating those holidays, because it was what they call nice open weather. That means it was simply muggy, and you could play out of doors without grown-ups fussing about your overcoat, or bringing you to open shame in the streets with knitted comforters, except, of course, the poet Noël, who is young, and equal to having bronchitis if he only looks at a pair of wet boots. But the girls were indoors a good deal, trying to make things for a bazaar which the people our housekeeper's elder sister lives with were having in the country for the benefit of a poor iron church that was in difficulties. And Noël and H. O. were with them, putting sweets in bags for the bazaar's lucky-tub. So Dicky and I were out alone together. But we were not angry with the others for their stuffy way of spending a day. Two is not a good number, though, for any game except fives; and the man who ordered the vineries and pineries, and butlers' pantries and things, never had the sense to tell the builders to make a fives court. Some people never think of the simplest things. So we had been playing catch with a fives ball. It was Dicky's ball, and Oswald said:

'I bet you can't hit it over the house.'

'What do you bet?' said Dicky.

And Oswald replied:

'Anything you like. You couldn't do it, anyhow.'

Dicky said:

'Miss Blake says betting is wicked; but I don't believe it is, if you don't bet money.'

Oswald reminded him how in 'Miss Edgeworth' even that wretched little Rosamond, who is never allowed to do anything she wants to, even lose her own needles, makes a bet with her brother, and none of the grown-ups turn a hair.

'But I don't want to bet,' he said. 'I know you can't do it.'

'I'll bet you my fives ball I do,' Dicky rejoindered.

'Done! I'll bet you that threepenny ball of string and the cobbler's wax you were bothering about yesterday.'

So Dicky said 'Done!' and then he went and got a tennis racket—when I meant with his hands—and the ball soared up to the top of the house and faded away. But when we went round to look for it we couldn't find it anywhere. So he said it had gone over and he had won. And Oswald thought it had not gone over, but stayed on the roof, and he hadn't. And they could not agree about it, though they talked of nothing else till tea time.

It was a few days after that that the big greenhouse began to leak, and something was said at brekker about had any of us been throwing stones. But it happened that we had not. Only after brek Oswald said to Dicky:

'What price fives balls for knocking holes in greenhouses?'

'Then you own it went over the house, and I won my bet. Hand over!' Dicky remarked.

But Oswald did not see this, because it wasn't proved it was the fives ball. It was only his idea.

Then it rained for two or three days, and the greenhouse leaked much more than just a fives ball, and the grown-ups said the man who put it up had scamped the job, and they sent for him to put it right....