The Lark Read online

  E. Nesbit

  * * *

  THE LARK

  With an introduction by Penelope Lively

  Contents

  INTRODUCTION

  CHAPTER I

  CHAPTER II

  CHAPTER III

  CHAPTER IV

  CHAPTER V

  CHAPTER VI

  CHAPTER VII

  CHAPTER VIII

  CHAPTER IX

  CHAPTER X

  CHAPTER XI

  CHAPTER XII

  CHAPTER XIII

  CHAPTER XIV

  CHAPTER XV

  CHAPTER XVI

  CHAPTER XVII

  CHAPTER XVIII

  CHAPTER XIX

  CHAPTER XX

  CHAPTER XXI

  CHAPTER XXII

  CHAPTER XXIII

  CHAPTER XXIV

  CHAPTER XXV

  CHAPTER XXVI

  CHAPTER XXVII

  CHAPTER XXVIII

  CHAPTER XXIX

  CHAPTER XXX

  CHAPTER XXXI

  FOLLOW PENGUIN

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  THE LARK

  E. Nesbit was born in Surrey in 1858. A world-famous children’s author, her works include The Railway Children and Five Children and It. She also wrote several works of fiction for adults. With her husband, Hubert Bland, she was one of the founding members of the socialist Fabian Society; their household became a centre of the socialist and literary circles of the times. She died in 1924.

  Penelope Lively is the author of many prize-winning novels and short-story collections for both adults and children. She has twice been shortlisted for the Booker Prize for her novels The Road to Lichfield and According to Mark. She later won the 1987 Booker Prize for her highly acclaimed novel Moon Tiger. Her other books include Oleander, Jacaranda, a memoir of her childhood in Egypt, Heat Wave, A House Unlocked, The Photograph, Making It Up, Consequences, Family Album, which was shortlisted for the 2009 Costa Novel Award, and How It All Began. She was appointed CBE in the 2001 New Year’s Honours List, and DBE in 2012. Penelope Lively lives in London.

  ‘Oh, Pallas, take your owl away,

  And let us have a lark instead!’

  Thomas Hood

  Introduction

  Edith Nesbit is known today only for her children’s books. The Lark is one of her eleven novels for adults; to read it is to recognize at once the Nesbit voice – her humour, her turn of phrase – slightly adjusted for an adult readership. It is an engaging period piece, replete with all the attitudes and assumptions of the day, and shot through with the light-hearted Nesbit touch.

  That inherent gaiety seems valiant; her life was far from easy. Married to a philandering husband, she had five children, one of whom died at fifteen, and accepted into the family two more of her husband’s by a mistress who was also absorbed as housekeeper and secretary. Alongside his infidelity, Hubert Bland was also apparently incapable of earning a living, which accounts in part for Nesbit’s vast working output: forty books for children, eleven adult novels and thirteen collections of short stories, a great deal of poetry. She had to write. Maybe we should be obliquely grateful to Hubert Bland for the joys of The Wouldbegoods, Five Children and It, The Phoenix and the Carpet, and all the rest. She and Bland were both followers of William Morris and members of the Fabian Society. Nesbit wrote and lectured on socialism in the 1880s: they entertained lavishly and casually; their home was seen as a bohemian retreat.

  So she was out of step in many ways with the ethos of the day. That said, The Lark, published in 1922, reflects absolutely the social mores of that time. The nineteen-year-old girls Jane and Lucilla, who are at the centre of the story, have a problem because they are living alone together and carrying on a business without a chaperone, class distinctions are richly manifest, the various working-class characters, sympathetically portrayed, have an element of stereotype in both speech and attitudes, and there is a fine contempt for those perceived as nouveau riche. The language of the girls and their associates is nicely peppered with contemporary jargon: people make asses of themselves, rag each other, are duffers or bricks, have a ripping time. Reading The Lark, you are plunged back into the early twentieth century.

  The crux of the story is itself something of a period set piece: genteel young women deprived of their inheritance and obliged to set up in business. But then Nesbit has fun with the situation: the girls try flower-selling, fail at that and take in paying guests, who are perfect fodder for a series of well-paced scenes of farce. Person after person turns out not to be what or who they had seemed to be, and of course eventually all is nicely resolved and the girls rewarded for their pluck and determination. Throughout, there has been emphasis on the virtue of picking yourself up, making the best of things, treating adverse circumstances as ‘a lark’: hence the title. It is impossible not to see a reflection of what must have been Nesbit’s own attitudes towards the challenges of her life. That alone, apart from its intrinsic merit as a charming and brilliantly entertaining novel, makes The Lark a significant work amid her prolific output.

  Penelope Lively

  CHAPTER I

  ‘You wouldn’t dare!’

  ‘Wouldn’t I? That’s all you know!’

  ‘You mustn’t dare her,’ said a third voice anxiously from the top of the library steps; ‘if you dare her she’ll do it as sure as Fate.’

  The one who must not be dared looked up and laughed. The golden light of midsummer afternoon falling through the tall library windows embroidered new patterns on the mellow Persian carpets, and touched to a dusky splendour the shelves on shelves of old calf and morocco, where here and there gilded lettering shone like rows of little sparks. It touched also the hair of the girl who must not be dared; she sat cross-legged on the floor among a heap of books, nursing a fat quarto volume with onyx-inlaid clasps and bosses, and touched the hair into glory, turning it from plain brown, which was its everyday colour, to a red gold halo which became her small white face very well.

  ‘Fate, indeed!’ she said. ‘Why, the whole thing’s Fate. Emmeline asks us here – good old Emmy! – because we’d nowhere to go when everybody got mumps. I shall always respect mumps for getting us this extra month’s holiday. I wish it had a prettier name – Mompessa, or something like that; we have the time of our lives amid all this ancestral splendour.’ She indicated the great beams and tall windows of the library with a gesture full of appreciation. ‘No, don’t interrupt. I’m telling the story. Angel Emmeline protects us from the footman and doesn’t let the butler trample on us. She’s given us the run of the baronial halls, and the stately ballroom, and the bed where Queen Elizabeth slept, and the library that came over with the Conqueror. We grub about and we find this, and because this isn’t the first library I’ve been in I happen to be able to read it.’ She thumped the book on her lap. ‘Don’t tell me it’s not Fate. Fate arranged it all. Fate meant me to try the spell. And I mean to. And as for not daring – pooh, my darling Emmeline, pooh! … Likewise pshaw!’ she added pensively.

  Emmeline smiled with calm indulgence. She was stout, squarely-made, plain-faced, kind-eyed, with a long, thick, mouse-coloured pigtail and small, white, well-kept hands. She began to pick up her books one by one and to put them back in their proper places on the shelves.

  ‘It’s all very well to say “pooh!” ’ she said.

  ‘And “pshaw!” ’ the not-to-be-dared interpolated.

  ‘My Aunt Emmeline tried it. A spell – and I expect it was that very one; at least, she set out to try it, but she lost her way in the wood. The night was very dark, and she gave it up, and came back, and when she got to the garden gate she couldn’t open it and couldn’t find the handle. And then the moon came out, and she found it was the door of the mausoleum in the park she was trying to get in
at.’

  ‘Shut up!’ said the girl on the top of the steps, a long-legged, long-armed, long-nosed, long-chinned girl rather like a well-bred filly. ‘Jane, do say you won’t do it. Not after that, will you?’

  ‘It’s a perfectly horrid story,’ said Jane, unmoved, ‘but you can’t frighten me in that way, Emmeline. However, it decides me to have lights. Those fairy lights and Chinese lanterns you had for what you called the “little” dance – I suppose they’re somewhere about. Do you know where, exactly?’ She urged the question with a firm hand-grasp.

  ‘Don’t pinch,’ said Emmeline, disengaging her ankle. ‘You can have the lights. But we shouldn’t be allowed to do it.’

  ‘Who’s going to be asked to allow anything?’ Jane said innocently. ‘Hasn’t Fate arranged it all? Aren’t all the grown-ups going to the Duchess’s grand fête and gala – fireworks and refreshments free?’

  ‘They’re going to Lady Hendon’s garden-party and dance, if that’s what you mean,’ said Emmeline, rather coldly.

  ‘That’s right – stand by your class. Ah, these old aristocrats!’ said Jane.

  ‘Lord Hendon was beer, wasn’t he?’ Lucilla asked from the steps. ‘Or was it bacon? He looks rather like a ham himself.’

  ‘Well, anyhow, beer or bacon or ham, all the grown-ups will be out of the way. We’re too young for these frantic dissipations. By the way’ – her straight forehead puckered itself anxiously – ‘I’m not too young to try that, am I? It says nothing about age in the book. It just says “any young maid or young bachelor”. I was fifteen last June.’

  ‘In James the First’s time, when this book was born, girls were married at fifteen,’ Lucilla reassured her, ‘but I do hope you won’t let that encourage you.’

  ‘I don’t need encouragement. I’m just going to. I’ll try that spell or I’ll know the reason why. Don’t be surly, Emmy; let’s go down and arrange the lanterns now while the sun’s shining, and get the candles and matches and have it all ready. Then we’ll have that nice little quiet dinner your dear mother’s ordered for us, and go to bed early just as she said. And then get up again. And then …’

  ‘Don’t,’ said Lucilla.

  ‘But I shall,’ said Jane.

  ‘Very well,’ said Lucilla with an air of finality, coming down the steps; ‘we have told you not to in at least seven different ways, because it was our duty, but if you really mean to – well, do, then! And I think it will be no end of a spree – if you don’t walk into the mausoleum and begin to scream and bring the retainers down on us, or do anything else silly that’ll get Emmy into rows.’

  ‘She won’t do that,’ said Emmeline. ‘We shan’t go beyond the park. Nobody minds anything if we don’t go outside. Besides, no one will know, if Jane manages it as well as she mostly does manage things.’

  ‘Miss Jane Quested’s Meretricious Magic. Manager, or General, Jane,’ said Jane, displaying herself as she rose with the square book under her arm. ‘I’m going to take this up to my room and learn the spell off by heart. It wouldn’t do to have any mistakes, would it? I may take it?’

  ‘You may take anything – but only on one condition,’ said Emmeline firmly.

  ‘Conditions? How cautious and sordid! What condition?’

  ‘That if you do see anything you’ll tell us exactly what it was like. You never can tell what it will be that you see. Sometimes you see a shroud, or skeleton, or a coffin, I believe, if you’re to die a maid.’

  Jane laughed.

  ‘What a merry companion you are, Emmy; not a dull moment when you’re about! Pity it’s alone or not at all. I should have loved to have you with me to-night to keep my spirits up with your cheery chatter. But, alas! it can’t be. Don’t look so glum.

  ‘ “Come, Pallas, take your owl away,

  And let us have a lark instead!” ’

  ‘If you call this a lark,’ said Emmeline, ‘I don’t.’

  ‘Now look here, Em,’ said Jane firmly; ‘if you don’t want me to do it, really I won’t. You’ve been such a brick to us. Say the word and I’ll chuck it. I really will. Don’t look so glum. I’m not wholly lost to all gratitude and proper feeling.’

  ‘Oh, don’t chuck it now!’ pleaded Lucilla, ‘just when Emmy and I have reconciled our yeasty consciences to the idea.’

  ‘Shall I chuck it, Emmy?’ Jane persisted. ‘Shall I?’

  ‘No,’ said Emmeline. ‘And stop talking about gratitude. And I won’t have your old owls thrown in my face for the rest of my life. Let’s have the lark.’

  If Jane, Lucilla, and Emmeline had not been debarred by their fifteen, fourteen, and sixteen years from the enjoyment of Lady Hendon’s hospitality they would have had the pleasure of meeting – or at least, for it was a very big garden-party, they might have had the pleasure of meeting – the young man whom it is now my privilege to introduce to you.

  John Rochester was young and, I am sorry to say, handsome. Sorry, because handsome men are, as a rule, so very stupid and so very vain. Still, there must be some exceptions to every rule. John Rochester was one of these exceptions: he was neither vain nor stupid. In fact he was more than rather clever, especially at his own game, which was engineering. Brains and beauty were not his only advantages. He had brains, beauty, and brawn – an almost irresistible combination. That is the bright side of the shield. The black side is this: he was not so tall, by three inches, as he could have wished to be, he had very big ambitions, very little money, very much less parsimony, and a temper.

  He also had a mother who powdered too much, rouged rather too brightly, and appeared to govern almost her whole life by the consideration of ‘what people would say’. She was quite a good mother in other respects, and John Rochester was quite fond of her. It was she who dragged him to this garden-party – that is to say, it was she who suggested it as an agreeable way of occupying the last day of the short holiday which he was spending with her. The young man himself would have preferred to loaf about in flannels and make himself useful by attacking the green-fly on the roses in his mother’s garden with clouds of that smoke so hopefully supposed to be fatal to aphides. But Mrs Rochester thought otherwise.

  ‘You ought to go,’ she said at breakfast. ‘The Hendons may be very useful to you in your career.’

  ‘I wish these pork-butchers wouldn’t use English place-names,’ he said, taking more honey. ‘Why can’t they stick to their age-old family names? I shouldn’t mind Lord Isaacs, or Lord Smith, or Lord – what was this chap’s name? – oh yes, Lord Hoggenheimer – but Lord Hendon! Yes, thank you, half a cup. This is a very jolly little place you’ve got here. Have you taken it for the whole of the summer?’

  ‘Yes, dear, you know I have, so don’t try to turn the subject. Even if his name were still Hoggenheimer, Lord Hendon might be useful to you. He’s something very important in the city.’

  ‘Perhaps I shall meet him some other time, when he’ll be able to realise my existence and be attracted by my interesting personality. He couldn’t do that at a crowded garden-party, you know.’

  ‘You don’t know Lord Hendon,’ she told him; ‘he could do anything anywhere. Why, he once bought a gold-mine from a man he met quite casually in the fish department of the Army and Navy Stores.’

  ‘Still keeps his old villa-dwelling habits? Brings home a little bit of fish to placate the missus when he’s going to be late home. Now I respect him for that – most men bring flowers or diamonds.’

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ said his mother serenely. ‘I want you to meet him, and that ought to be enough. Besides, I’ve got a new frock on purpose; crêpe-de-chine in about six shades of heliotrope and pink and blue.’

  ‘Oh,’ said John, ‘of course that settles it.’

  And indeed, he felt it did.

  ‘And a new hat,’ she went on. ‘It really is a dream. So you will go?’

  ‘All right, dear,’ he said, ‘I’ll go, since you’ve set your heart and your frock and your hat on it. I must catch a train to-night, though, s
o I’ll send my traps to the station, and then I can go straight from Lord Hoggenheimer’s. I know you won’t want to leave as long as there’s a note left in the band.’

  ‘Yes, that will be best,’ she agreed; ‘and now that’s settled comfortably, I want to have a little quiet talk with you.’

  ‘May I smoke?’ he asked, at once plunged in dejection. He knew his mother’s little quiet talks.

  ‘Of course you may smoke, if it doesn’t distract your attention, because what I’ve got to say is very serious indeed. I’ve been thinking things over for a long time; you mustn’t suppose this is a new idea. You know, my darling boy, my little income dies with me. Yes, I know you are getting on very nicely in your profession, but it only advances you financially, and that very slowly. There’s no social advancement in it.’

  ‘I shall invent something some of these days, and then you can have all the social and financial advancement you want,’ he said rather bitterly.

  ‘That’s another point. You have no time for your inventions – I’m sure you’ve often told me so. You want time, and you want money, and if you don’t want social advancement your poor old mother wants it for you.’

  ‘Well?’ he said, now very much on his guard.

  ‘Think what it would be like,’ she went on, ‘never to have to work for money – just to have that workshop you’ve so often talked about, and just look in and do a little inventing there whenever you felt inclined. No bothers, no interruptions – entirely your own master. And all the steel things you want always handy.’

  ‘A lovely and accurate picture of an inventor’s life!’ he laughed.

  ‘It’s nothing to laugh about,’ she said; ‘because I have an idea. Why shouldn’t you marry? Some nice girl whom you really like and who has money.’

  ‘When I marry,’ he said, getting up and standing with his back to the ferns in the fireplace, ‘it won’t be to live on my wife.’