The Red Book Magazine/Volume 8/Number 6/How Jake Went Home

BY E. NESBIT

It is very difficult to believe all you hear, and even all you see if you are the kind of person that really sees at all. But when things are printed, of course they must be true; so you will find it quite easy to believe what I am going to tell you. I don't quite know what I am going to tell you, because no one has told me yet. But I know some one will—

Now, see how oddly things turn out: Just as I had written that I heard the prettiest voice in the world outside my window.

“Is there anyone at home?”

I looked out carefully to see who it was, because, of course, it might have been the taxes, or the water-rate, or a bore in a bonnet. Instead of which, it was the most beautiful of all the beautiful Princesses I know; so I went out and sat with her on the low wall that divides my garden from the white road where the pink convolvuluses make flat round patches among the wayside grass, and we watched the sheep go slowly by, for this is market day in the town.

The Princess is not living in her Palace just now, as you will have guessed from her coming to sit on my humble wall. She is lodging at the seaside. That was why her hair was hanging all dark and long over her royal shoulders, instead of being tidily tucked up under her crown as the hair of a princess must always be when she is at home. It was also the reason why she carried a basket with strawberries in it, and a pat of butter, and two penny buns, which would presently be somebody's lunch. And the story she told me was the story of the little boy who went home.

Jake Jenkins was his name, and he lived in a very nasty street in London: a street that is a turning out of Googe Street, which turns out of the Tottenham Court Road, which turns out of Oxford Street, which is too proud to turn out of anything. Sutton Row the street was called where Jake lived and it was one of those streets where the sidewalks is always bordered with cabbage stalks and orange peel and crushed banana skins, instead of the clean green grass with daisies in it, that all sidewalks ought to be bordered with. And when the wind blew, instead of the brown bright fallen leaves or the bits of clean hay that blow about in country roads, pieces of horrible dirty, torn paper were caught up and fluttered down the ugly grimy street and in at people's dirty front doors. For in Sutton Row all the doors are always open, and the children sit on the doorsteps playing with bones and rags and bits of dirty brick and dead mice, and none of them ever has any pocket-handkerchief.

Jake lived with his aunt, because he had no father and mother, and the aunt was not unkind to him; but she did not have time to be very kind because she had to work about fourteen hours a day sewing strips of dyed rabbit fur together, and the fluff used to get into her throat so that she was always coughing. As she got only about a shilling a day for this work it wasn't easy for her to keep herself, let alone Jake. There was a big dingy untidy bed in the room, and a table, and a chair whose cane seat had a hole in it, and the broken canes stuck out underneath like the quills of a very untidy and careless porcupine. The black and brown fur used to lie all about on bed and table and chair and floor and the fluff got into Jake's throat, too, and made him cough, which was one reason why he liked to spend as much time as he could in the streets. In fine weather he used to look at the shops, and whiten the tip of his nose by pressing it against the windows of those that sold things to eat.

One day, when the tip of his nose was feeling quite cold from so long being pressed against the glass, someone touched him on his little thin shoulder. He jumped, because he thought it was the policeman. In London, and especially if you are poor, there are quite a lot of things you mustn't do, things that you would never think were wrong unless you had been told, and it is the policeman who tells you what these things are. But it wasn't the policeman this time. It was a lady with the most beautiful green eyes in the world. In fact, it was my Princess.

“Are you hungry, dear?” she said.

“Yes,” said Jake, because he was, always.

Then the lady went into the shop and bought a penny bun and a bath bun and a cream bun, and gave them all to Jake in a paper bag, and she squeezed his little dirty hand.

“I wish you could have them every day, you poor, dear little chap.”

She left him there so full of happiness that at first he felt he was too full to have room even for buns.

He recovered, however, and ate the penny bun first, because it looked, and indeed was, the plainest. Then he ate nearly all the Bath bun. And then he took one bite of the cream bun.

“Oh!” said Jake, and his blue eyes were as round as saucers. “I didn't think there could be anything so good.”

And then he finished the buns to the very last crumbs in the paper bag, and went to look in at the garden in Bloomsbury Square, and he looked through at the green grass and graveled walks, and wished that he could find a garden where all the children could play, not just only the ones whose mothers had the keys of the cold iron gates.

“If I was always in a garden, and the lady to give me things to eat. Oh Jimminy!” said Jake.

After a long time he turned to go home, but his eyes were so full of green trees and green grass, and his mind was so full of cream buns and my Princess that he did not look where he was going, and he did not care.

That was how it happened that at the corner of Googe Street a cab horse knocked him down with its big, soft nose, and before he could pick himself up the cab wheel went over him, and they carried him to the Middlesex Hospital at the end of Googe Street, and when he woke up he was in the loveliest bed you can imagine, and a very kind lady was leaning over him and calling him “dear,” just as my Princess had done. In Sutton Row, you know, they do not call the children “dear,” but quite different names, even when they mean to be kind.

Being in hospital is rather like being in heaven, when you are a child and have always lived in Sutton Row. No one cuffs you or pushes you roughly out of the way. There is no scolding. There are large clean beds that jump softly when you move, and you have a bed to yourself—which Jake had never had before—and things to eat nicer than you ever dreamed of: chicken and rice pudding, and fish and mutton, and all the things some people get into the habit of turning their noses up at a nursery dinner. And there are toys to play with—real toys: soldiers and puzzles and bricks—not just mutton-bones and bits of brick and dead mice.

Even if your legs do hurt rather badly, it is worth while to go to Hospital when you have spent all your life in Sutton Row.

“I likes the eating, and the drinking, and the lying and the ladies, and the everything,” said Jake. “I wish I 'adn't never got to go 'ome no more.”

But unfortunately nobody is allowed to stay on for ever in a hospital, except of course the doctors and nurses.

“Me got to go 'ome again?” Jake asked. “Couldn't you let me stop on a bit? I wouldn't give no trouble. I could 'elp clean the floors and wash up and that.”

The nurse laughed.

‘All right, Tommy,” she said—all boys are called Tommy in the hospital when when they're not called “dear”—“you aren't going home yet awhile. You're to go down to the sea, and get strong and well first.”

“What sea?” asked Jake.

“The sea,” said the nurse, who was rather in a hurry. “It's all blue water, you know, and there's sand to dig in, and all sorts of lovely things.”

“Things to eat?” asked Jake, who had never had enough to eat in his life till he got run over.

“I should think so,” said the nurse gaily. “Meat every day, and cake and jam and milk, and strawberries, I shouldn't wonder.”

Jake pondered these beautiful words, and that was why he did not cry quite as much as was expected when he was put into the cab that was to take him to the railway station. He cried quite as much as was good for him, went to sleep in the train, and hardly woke up to know that he was being fed with sweet bread and milk, and put to sleep in a bed like the ones in the hospital.

And next day there was the sand, wide and yellow and wonderfully clean, with yellow sea-poppies and sea-thistles growing on one side of it, and on the other the sea, blue and smooth and going on and on and on as far as you could see.

“And farther,” said Jake to himself, “oh, very, very much farther.”

He lay on the hot gold sand and looked at the hot gold sun, and the hot blue sky. He was very comfortable. He had a soft clean shirt to wear, and a soft clean sailor suit, and a clean pocket-handkerchief with purple anchors in its corners.

No one knows how comfortable clean soft clothes are, unless they have had to wear hard, dirty ones, all their lives, as Jake had done.

He was only six, but six years are very long in Sutton Row.

“I wish Sutton Row was like this 'ere,” he said.

And then the wonderful thing happened. My Princess came to him quickly, from nowhere as it seemed, and sat down on the sand and held out her dear arms to him.

“Why!” she said, “”it's you!”

Jake owned that it was enough.”

“You're the little boy that—”

“Yes,” said Jake, and wriggled on her lap and put his head on the kindest shoulder in the world.

“But how did you get here?”

“'ospital,” said Jake enthusiastically; “both my legs broke along of a keb going over 'em. They've mended 'em up a bit, and they're going to get mended for good in this 'ere sandy-sea-place. I say, aint this 'ere just a little bit of all right?” His thin sandy yellow claws played with her jingling bangles.

“So you're going to get well here,” said my Princess.

Jake told her “Yes,” and many other things.

The nurses in the hospital had been kind-kind-kind; but they had not nursed him on soft laps of smooth blue stuff: their laps were stiff with aprons, and they had not much time, anyhow, to nurse little boys,

“How soft and sweet you are,” said Jake. “You smell like the flowers-stalls in Googe street. Don't go away; I want to stay along er you.”

“I'll come back,” said the lady who is my Princess. “I'm going into the sea now. I'm going to swim and see the seaweed floating like islands, and the fishes swimming, and all the little shells and stones on the bottom of the sea. And even a mermaid, perhaps, if I'm lucky.”

“England's a island what we lives on. Sutton Court's part of it. I don't think much of islands,” said Jake. “What's mermaids?”

The lady told him a little about mermaids.

“Are they kind and soft to sit on like you?” he asked.

“They're always kind—at least, I feel sure they are,” she said, “but they're cold and slippery. It's nicer to be nursed by land people. But they live in pearly houses under the sea, and no one is ever cross, or angry, or hungry, or unhappy there.”

“I should like to go there,” said Jake.

“Perhaps we'll go together some day,” said my Princess, and went to bathe.

After that, every day she talked to him and told him stories, and built sand castles with him, and gathered shells for him, and life became a perfectly beautiful thing to Jake, because the sea and the sky and the sand are so good and beautiful and my Princess is so beautiful and good.

So every day he grew stronger and stronger, and his face that had been so pale and lemon-colored grew brown, and his blue eyes looked bluer than ever between their tanned lids. And he knew now the names of shells, and of the little sea beasts that lie on the sand at low-tide. And the sun shone every day and all day long.

Then quite suddenly, the end came. He was cured, as far as he could be cured, and he must go back to Sutton Row to make room for some other child to lie in his lovely soft white clean bed, and eat good things that he liked so to eat, and to be nursed on the warm beach by the lady who is the dearest under the sun.

They told him quite kindly, and he only said:

“Must I really go 'ome?”

And they said, “Yes, you must, really.”

“When?” said Jake.

And they said “Tomorrow.”

That day, when the lady set him down on the warm sandy beach beside the castle she had built for him, and set out for her bath, he did not sit still as usual but went after her—slowly, because of the broken legs that would never be quite the same as legs that no cab wheels had gone over. He saw her go down the stone groin in her white bathing cloak, and, at the end of the groin where the deep water was, she cast her white gown on the stone and stood up in her blue swimming dress and dived deep-deep into the water.

Jake crept along over the rough stones of the groin, that were warm to creeping hands and knees, and came to the place where the stones were wet with the splash of the green water that had covered his lady. She was swimming out to sea now; he could see the darkness of her hair in a long streak behind her as she swam.

Then he leaned over and looked down into the deeps of the water, but he could not see the shells at the bottom, nor the mermaids, and he wanted to see them.

“I think I will go and look,” said Jake to himself, “if my Lady's there. Perhaps they'll let me stay down there along of her and never go home no more. There must be lots of room at the bottom of the sea.”

The water was cold as it closed over his head, and there was a humming in his ears like the snarling, moaning noise of London streets. Had he fallen asleep? Had they taken him home without waking him?

“No, no,” Jake tried to say. “I don't want to go home. I won't go home.”

And he sank to the bottom of the sea—and through it, and the floor of the sea closed behind him, and he was in another world. Have you never thought that the floor of this world may be the sky of another world, just as the floor of heaven is the same as our sky?

He fell right through the sea-floor, and out of the sky of that lower world on to its green meadows. And he did not hurt himself at all because the big white birds that live there came and carried him down on wings as soft as the lap of any Princess.

They laid him down in a grassy green field where there were daisies. White May bushes grew all about, and at the end of the field was a garden with a red wall round it. There were trees leaning over the garden wall, and on the trees strawberries and cherries and bananas and lettuces and oranges were growing in rich profusion.

“Oh my,” said Jake, “if I only 'ad the key of the gate!”

But when he got to the gate, which was exactly like the gates of the Square Gardens, he found that it was open, and he walked straight through. He went up the path, between plants covered with strange and beautiful flowers. Some of the shrubs looked like Christmas trees for they had toys growing on them, soldiers and boxes of bricks and puzzles. He paused entranced before the beautiful half-opened buds of a tin-soldier bush, and it was hard to pass the tall tree among whose glossy leaves red and green india rubber balls were glistening in dewy freshness. And a top-tree, whose fruit was falling to the ground with ripeness, held him for a moment. But he went on. He did not dare to pick any of the toys.

And presently he came to the house, and it was queer, but delightful. Gay colored curtains fluttered at the upper windows, which were all open. And all the lower windows were filled with nice things to eat, like the windows of the shops in Googe Street. The door was wide open, and quickly some one in a blue dress came flying through it and down the marble steps to meet him.

“Why! it's you!” said Jake as arms went round him, arms that he knew.

“Yes, dear. Aren't you glad you've come home?” said my Princess's voice.

“This aint 'ome,” said Jake.

“Oh, yes, it is,” said she, “and you're going to live here forever, my own little boy. Come along, let's go and pick strawberries.”

The strawberries grew on tall trees, just like the ones in Bloomsbury Square, and my Princess bent down the branches, so that Jake could gather for himself. And she picked him a ball from the ball tree, and several buds from the tin soldier tree, and they sat and enjoyed everything on the smooth lawn in the sunshine. There is a very nice sun in the under-sea world.

“Lor',” said Jake, “aint it prime? But what about the coppers? Won't they run us in for setting about on the grass so free? Or p'raps you've got the key of the gate?”

“There aren't any keys here,” said my Princess—at least, if it wasn't my Princess I don't know who it could have been. “Nobody wants to lock up the grass or the strawberries or the cakes. There's plenty for everyone.”

“Don't no one never eat too much?” asked Jake, who a week before had had his lesson on this subject, illustrated by jam pudding.

“Oh no,” the Lady told him. “It's only when people aren't quite sure that there's plenty for everyone that they take too much.”

“And what do they do here? Not work, do they?”

Jake was thinking of the furry fluff and his aunt's cough.

“Oh yes. Everyone works, and so everyone gets work done early, and there is plenty of time to play. Look, there are the children coming out of school. Don't they seem happy?”

The children came up a grassy avenue of trees skipping and running and laughing and singing as they came. They all wore white smocks and leather belts and their feet were bare and brown on the green grass. With them were grown-up people, in clothes that looked comfortable as well as pretty, and none of the ladies had the kind of hat that makes the spectator so anxious, because it seems as if it might blow off at any moment.

“Why!” cried Jake very much surprised, “nobody looks cross.”

“Of course not,” said the lady, “why should they? Work-time's over, and now it's play-time; and presently it'll be sleepy time. And then work-time again to-morrow. Look! They're coming to ask you to play with them.”

A brown-eyed child came smiling shyly and kindly; took Jake by the hand, and led him away, and my Princess sat on the marble steps of that beautiful house and watched the games till Jake, tired out with pleasure, came to fill her hand with the flowers he had gathered, and, sleepily happy, to lay his head in her lap.

“Work time, play time, sleepy time,” she said. “I shall just have time to tuck you up in bed, my own little boy, and then I must go.”

“Go?” Jake was miserably awake in an instant. “You aint going—not without me?”

“I must,” she said. “My work's not here, and I've got to go and do it. I shall come back to you some day. But everyone here is kind. You'll be very happy here, dear.”

“You aint agoin' to go away—not without me,” said Jake sniffing.

“You'll be very, very happy here, you know you will, won't you, dear?” she said, holding him close.

But Jake would say nothing but, “You aint agoin' away—not without me?” And he said it over and over again.

“But there's everything here that anyone could want. Think of the strawberry trees.”

“I'd rather have you a long sight,” he said. “And you aint agoin' away—not without me, are you?”

“Would you rather have me—even,” said the lady who was either my Princess or nobody, “even if we had to live in the old world where so many people are unkind and stupid and dirty?”

“Couldn't you learn them to be clean like me,” said Jake, fingering his soft shirt proudly, “and kind like you?” he added, his arms round her neck.

“We might try. But if you can't do without me, Jake, we must go back—now. Are you sure you wouldn't like to stay here without me? Going back will hurt you rather badly, dear.”

“Bad as my legs?”

“I don't know; worse perhaps.”

“I don't care,” said Jake stoutly, “only you said I was to be your own little boy.”

“My own, own little boy,” said the lady, “for ever and ever. Now, shut your eyes and I'll carry you, and I'll try not to let the going back hurt you more than it will be necessary.”

It did hurt though, horribly. And when the hurting was over Jake was in bed in a room with a window that looks over the sea—such a pretty room Jake tells me—and the dearest lady alive had got her dear arms round him, and was looking at him “with her eyes just as if she'd been crying,” Jake said.

“Your own-own little boy,” gasped Jake, and it was quite hard for him to speak at all.

“My very own,” said my Princess.

And so he is.

I think I said that the most dear Princess in the world told me this story—but of course she didn't. She only told me quite a little bit of it, and by the time she came to the end of that little bit her eyes looked just as Jake had said.

“You see,” she said, “he'd never have tumbled into the sea if I hadn't told him that nonsense about mermaids. He went to look for them. So it was really all my fault. So, of course, he belongs to me now. Don't you see?”

I said I did see; and we talked about other things.

It was Jake who told me most of the story, of course; and I never asked him to explain the parts I didn't understand.

So Jake is now “very own little boy” to my Princess, and he will grow up to be a Prince, a very good and clever one, I think. Because, of course, he was a Prince by birth, and now he has come home to his kingdom of love and happiness. It is an odd thing, considering that all little babies are born Princes and Princesses, that so few of them come to their kingdoms in this world. There must be a screw loose somewhere, don't you think?