The Incredible Honeymoon. Nesbit Edith

I'll put it to you like this: If you can make up your mind to talk the language of agreeable little boys who have recovered their trousers, I am disposed to endure your company and even to assist you in any play you may have in hand. But I can't associate with a person who grunts at me. If you want to grunt, go and grunt at some one who likes it. I don't."

      "I didn't go for to," Tommy urged.

      "Handsomely admitted. I accept your apology. You don't know what you'd like to do, I say. Well, is there anything you'd like to have? I'm living the idle life, Tommy, and my hands are beginning to ache for want of something to do. I want to make something. Ever make anything?"

      "I made a rabbit-hutch, onst," Tommy owned, "but the door warn't straight on her hinges. And I tried a kite – but it stuck to me and come to bits afore ever it was dry."

      "Look here," said the stranger, sitting up, "what about a kite? I could make you a kite as big as a house or a fire-balloon. Would you like that?"

      Tommy began a grunt, pretended that it had been a cough, and turned that into, "Yes, please, sir."

      "We must restrain Charles," said the stranger, turning to the large white dog, who sat with feet firmly planted, smiling a wide, pink smile, "or this kite will certainly stick to him and come to pieces afore it's dry. Where's the shop?"

      "Down street," said Tommy. "I could pop down street in a minute for the paper and things."

      "Sure you'd rather have a kite than anything else?"

      Tommy hesitated, and then said of course he'd rather have a hairyplane, but he supposed the stranger couldn't.

      To which the stranger startlingly replied, "Oh, couldn't I, my boy! Father got a horse and trap?" he went on. And from that moment the most wonderful four days of Tommy's life moved forward majestically without pause or let.

      To drive into Eastbourne with the gentleman – rather slow the old horse was, but it was the best trap – to hold the reins outside important and unusual shops, including the Eastbourne Motor-Car Company and the telegraph-office at the station; to be taken to dinner at a fine hotel with flowers in all the windows, and real waiters dressed exactly like the gentlemen who sang at the school concert, white ties and all – or just like the butler at Mr. Ferney's who had the training-stables – and such things to eat as Tommy "never did."

      The horse and trap were put up at Mr. Pettigrew's Livery and Bait Stables, in itself an act of unheard-of daring and extravagance. And after dinner the stranger got a motor-car – a real private one – none of your red flags and mustn't ride on the front seat, where, in fact, he and the stranger did, with great dash and daring, actually ride. And they went to Pevensy and Hurstmonceau and Hastings, and the stranger told Tommy stories about the places, so that history was never quite itself again to Tommy. Then back to Eastbourne, to call again at the unusual shops, as well as at one of the more usual character, where the stranger bought toffee and buns and cake and peppermint creams; to get a parcel from the station, and so home round the feet of the downs in the pleasant-colored evening, with the dust white on the hedges, and the furze in flower, and the skylarks singing "fit to bu'st theirselves," as Tommy pointed out when the stranger called his attention to the little, dark, singing specks against the clear sky, the old white horse going at a spanking pace. No one would have believed he had it in him, compared to what he was in the morning; and drawing up very short and sharp in front of the porch – no driving into the yard and just calling for Robert – and father himself coming out to take the reins. Oh, that was a day!

      To the stranger, also, whose name, it will surprise you little to learn, was Edward Basingstoke, the home-coming was not without charm. The day before he had been welcomed as a guest; now he was welcomed as a friend, one who had taken Tommy for an outing and spent money on him like water. Any one could see that from the parcels the child had his arms full of.

      Robert in the stable, hearing the return, and heartened by the unmistakable attitude of the family, loosened Charles from the taut chain at whose end he had choked all day, and sent him flying like a large white bullet into the bar, where his master was standing. Charles knocked over a table and three glasses, trod on the edge of a spittoon and upset it, and the landlord said it didn't matter! Could any reception have been more warmly welcoming?

      It charmed Edward so much that he said, "When Tommy's face is washed, might he have tea with me to finish up the day?"

      And this, too, happened. And after tea, when Charles had been partially calmed by five whole buns, eaten in five eager mouthfuls, they undid the parcels, and Tommy reveled in the tools and metals, the wood, the canvas, the dozen other things he knew neither the names nor the uses of. And when it was time to say good night and they had said it, Tommy wanted to say something else. He stood by the parlor door, shuffling his boots and looking with blue, adoring eyes at the stranger.

      "I say," he said.

      "Well, what do you say?"

      "I say," was still all that Tommy said.

      "Yes, I hear you do. But what?"

      "I'm right-down glad you come here to stay, instead of going on to Wilmington, like what you might have," was the most Tommy could do. Then he added, after a fierce, brief struggle between affection and shyness: "I do take it very kind, sir – and the peppermints, and all. Good night, sir."

      It was the happiest day Edward had spent since he left Crewe.

      And next day they began to make the aeroplane. I do not know how toy aeroplanes are made. There may be a hundred ways of making them. If there are, Mr. Basingstoke knew at least one of these ways, and it was quite a good way, too. The village carpenter and the village blacksmith each was visited – I know that – and a good deal of the work was done at the carpenter's bench. And at the end of the third day the toy was ready.

      "We'll fly it in the morning," said Mr. Basingstoke. "Are you glad it's done? Sure you wouldn't have liked a kite better?"

      "Not by long chalks," was Tommy's fervent answer.

      The little aeroplane sat on the little stand the carpenter had made for it, shiny with varnish, white with canvas, glittering in all its metal mysteries.

      "Jiminy!" said Tommy, awe-stricken at his own good fortune, "I didn't know anybody could be so clever as what you are."

      Edward Basingstoke, as he went to bed, wondered whether, after all, he could spend his money to any better purpose than going about the country making aeroplanes to please little boys.

      III

      EDEN

      WHEN you have made an aeroplane, the next thing is to make it fly. And however agreeable an admiring audience may be while one is fiddling with definite and concrete objects of wood, canvas, and metal, one is apt, for the flight itself – the great flight, the flight by which the aeroplane shall stand or fall – to desire solitude.

      That was why Edward drew the yellow blind up and the dimity curtain aside and turned his bed round, so that the sun at its first rising should strike through his dreams and awaken him. The sun did exactly what it was expected to do, and Edward awoke saying "Bother" before he remembered that "Bother" was not at all what he meant. Then he got up and splashed gently, so as not to break the audible sleep of the people in the next room, stole down the creaking, twisted stairs in his tennis-shoes, soft-footed as a cat, drew the bolts of the back door, and slipped out, closing the door noiselessly behind him. He was careful to draw the bolt into its place again by means of a bit of fishing-line. You can do this quite easily with an old door that does not fit very closely – if you are careful to mark with chalk on the outside of the door, as Edward did, the exact place where the bolt is. Having thus secured the door against passing tramps or burglars, he went out across the highroad, soft with thick, white dust, where the dew lay on hedge and grassy border, and the sun made diamonds of the dew. Charles, choking himself in the stable, grew faint with distance.

      Beyond the village was a meadow suited to his needs. It was bordered on one side by a high red-brick wall, above whose moss-grown coping the rounded shapes of trees leaned. A wood edged it on two other sides, and in the front was a road.

      Here he made his preparations, wound up his machine,