The Lark

Introduction

The Lark is a novel for grown-up children. It has many of the ingredients of E. Nesbit’s childrens’ fiction, starting with a magic spell, and moving on to secret doors, missing keys, dressing up, trespassing in shut-up houses, imprisonment, good-hearted burglars, small but dramatic injuries, mistaken identities, extraordinary coincidences, boats, trains, pet rabbits, cocoa, and small squabbles about nothing in particular. And it is bursting with the same energy, humour and sense of discovery that made Nesbit one of the best-selling childrens’ authors of the early twentieth century. As in The Wouldbegoods, The House of Arden, Five Children and It, and The Railway Children, she revels in the power of fiction to make things turn out all right.

The ‘lark’ of the title is not a bird, but the kind of word Oswald Bastable would have used for an escapade, an adventure. As Jane, the central character, puts it:

Life is a lark – all the parts of it, I mean, that are generally treated seriously: money, and worries about money, and not being sure what’s going to happen. Looked at rightly, all that’s an adventure, a lark. As long as you have enough to eat and to wear and a roof to sleep under, the whole thing’s a lark. Life is a lark for us, and we must treat it as such.

This outlook, wholeheartedly endorsed by the author, is startling, given the times and the circumstances in which the book was written. Published in 1922, originally in serial form, The Lark was Nesbit’s last full-length book. It is likely that she knew this would be the case. Nesbit’s lifelong enthusiasm for smoking had wrecked her lungs. Now in her sixties, she was living in reduced circumstances in a converted Air Force hut on Romney Marsh. Her early adult life had been dominated by the need to earn enough money to keep her family afloat. Married young to the charismatic but feckless and pathologically unfaithful journalist Hubert Bland, Edith churned out endless forgettable verses, short stories and articles for magazines until she hit her stride in 1899 with The Story of the Treasure Seekers. For the next decade, money flowed steadily as her books took hold of the hearts and imaginations of the nation’s children. The Blands left suburban south-east London for the grand, romantic, but decaying Well Hall in Eltham, where they lived in high Bohemian style for the next twenty-three years – Noel Coward called Nesbit ‘the most genuine Bohemian I ever met’. But reversals of fortune – the death of Hubert, declining sales, the First World War – ended the idyll.

Well Hall becomes Cedar Court, the main non-human character in The Lark. After a period of unhappy widowhood, in 1917 Nesbit married Thomas Terry Tucker, Captain of the Woolwich ferry, always known as ‘the Skipper’. Nesbit was delighted to become the Skipper’s ‘Mate’. Her second husband was short, tubby, sixty years old, and by no means ‘a gentleman’, but he was loyal, considerate, immensely practical, and he looked after his Mate tenderly. Well Hall was a bit like her first husband – handsome, fascinating, but very hard work. The Skipper persuaded her to relinquish the burden of responsibility and live snugly within their means in the twin huts he fitted out for them on the Marsh. Nesbit loved ‘the sound of the sea and the skylarks, and the forever changing beauty of the marsh and the sky’, but the move was a wrench; The Lark is a loving tribute to the old house which had dominated her imagination for so many years.

When the Blands first moved to Well Hall, Eltham was still rural. After the War, London expanded rapidly; Nesbit chronicles the change in her description of Cedar Court:

The house stood large and lonely among a wilderness of little streets, brickfields, cabbage fields, ruined meadows where broken hedges and a few old thorn trees lingered to remind the world of the green lanes and meadows of long ago.

Jane Quested and Lucilla Craye are naturals for Cedar Court. Like their creator, the girls are drawn to old buildings – they dismiss the idea of a new life in Canada because it has no old houses, and ‘your mind would be cold there as well as your body’. Jane and Lucilla have very warm minds. As with most of Nesbit’s favourite characters, they are readers, and their reactions are shaped by poetry and fiction. Jane, who when deep in a book ‘wished for invisibility’ so that no one would disturb her, is particularly drawn to the romance of a place where ‘long red walls, buttressed in days when the eighth Henry was king, enclosed a garden that even then had been a garden for uncounted years’. The girls have an untutored but strong and original aesthetic sense; they immediately see how the modern paints – a ‘gas green’, a ‘vivid, heartless pink’, a ‘fierce full blue’ – must be stripped to allow the old oak to speak for itself. Nesbit indulges her own visual tastes in The Lark; her love of flowers, fabrics, glass, china, old pewter, well-made furniture, ‘mellow Persian carpets’, ‘the dusky splendour of old calf and morocco’, with ‘gilded lettering like rows of little sparks’, enriches every page. For two decades she had filled Well Hall with things she loved. To finance the move to Romney Marsh, nearly everything had to be sold, so she celebrates lost visual glories in this novel.

The story opens, characteristically, with a challenge – ‘You wouldn’t dare!’ ‘Wouldn’t I? That’s all you know’. The daring one is Jane. Blessed with ‘fifteen’s wild woodland grace’, she crowns herself with ‘starry golden flowers’, stands alone in a wooded Kentish garden on St John’s Eve, and repeats a charm she has found in an old book to ‘let me now my true love see’. John Rochester, taking a night time walk to clear his mind, becomes ensnared as if in a fairy tale; ‘briars tore at him, hazel switches stung his hands and face’. Vaulting a fence, he finds ‘smooth green sward’ under his feet, and as the church clock strikes midnight comes face to face with Jane who stands ‘like a young fawn at gaze’.

E. Nesbit undercuts the erotic charge with humour – Rochester overhears Jane describing him as ‘like a Greek god’ and bashfully retreats – but the incident shapes future choices for them both. The reader knows that Nesbit can be trusted to fulfill the spell thus cast. Jane, ‘slender, still, silent’ with her ‘white, elfish face’, is akin to the child Elfrida in The House Of Arden, but her incantation must produce not magical adventures but a real-life, adult outcome.

Emerging from boarding school four years later, at the end of the War from which they have been sheltered, the girls breathe life into the damaged people and places they encounter. At Madame Tussaud’s they turn Mr Dix from a seeming waxwork into a red-blooded man. To Dix, Jane and Lucilla are like Pre-Raphaelite heroines: ‘[across] swathes of mown grass and groundsel, dock and comfrey, nettles and thistle and willowherb, came a bright vision of basket-bearing maidens in flowered gowns, all pink and green and blue and purple’. But they are also young women of the twentieth century, forced by circumstances to fend for themselves. Their mysterious journey to Hope Cottage, where the table is set with a fairy feast and the attic is full of silk dresses and lace petticoats, is pure (and enjoyable) fantasy, but once Fortune has ‘upset the coach’, reality of a kind kicks in. ‘You have often begged me’, their absconding guardian tells them, ‘to let you lead your own lives. Well – lead them’.

Nesbit’s experience of falling back on her own resources is paralleled in the efforts Jane and Lucilla make to earn a living. During the war, Nesbit had sold garden produce, kept chickens, taken paying guests (‘pigs’), made marmalade in industrial quantities. Well Hall had evolved from a family house and social playground – ‘a place’ as H.G. Wells put it, ‘to which one rushed down from town at the week-end to snatch one’s bed before anyone else got it’ – into a small community where everyone, in theory, did their bit for the war effort. Similarly, Jane and Lucilla discuss market gardening, keeping fowls and rabbits, taking paying guests, writing novels, wood-carving, dressmaking, and becoming ‘strolling minstrels’. The more fanciful notions fall by the wayside, but the flower-selling takes off. They are only dimly aware that its success is due in part to their own charms. Their first customers are the workmen who pass their gate on their way to building a new estate. ‘The girls got quite used to the admiration which their garden excited in these men’, remarks E. Nesbit, wryly.

The workmen are lucky to have jobs. Though The Lark is, by and large, a romp, the realities of post-war life do surface. The papers are ‘full of the housing problem’, the girls rescue Dix from destitution, some of the ‘pigs’ have turned to crime because they can’t find work. E. Nesbit and Hubert Bland had been founder members of the Fabian Society, and an endearing Robin Hood view of economic and social justice is espoused by Jane and Lucilla, who sympathise with impoverished burglars and want to employ as gardeners ‘men who’ve fought in the war and got pensions too small. They can come and garden and share the profits’. Most interesting, in this context, is Hilda Antrobus, the plain heiress who is dangled in front of John Rochester as a future bride. It is clear to the reader that Rochester is Jane’s intended, and that the job of the narrative is to chart the way of this outcome, but Hilda, thrown into the path by Rochester’s mercenary mother, is ‘a personality that, as gipsies would say, crossed their luck’. ‘Antrobus! It makes me think of a medieval engine of war’ exclaims the subconsciously jealous Jane, but Nesbit will not allow the girl not blessed with looks to be a figure of fun. While Jane and Lucilla spent the war in a cocoon, Hilda Antrobus did hospital work in France, and is now studying political economy – ‘not domestic-political’, she politely stresses – and works for the Help For Heroes Society. Hilda tells ‘of children whose fathers had fallen in France and who now, in the land that was to be a land fit for heroes, lack food and clothes’. She can cook, garden, nurse, and make clothes; ‘she says the more things you can do the more interesting life is’. Her efforts, and her generosity of spirit, put the more frivolous Jane and Lucilla ever so slightly to shame.

A useful side-effect of Hilda Antrobus’ sense of purpose is that she ceases to find John Rochester appealing – in fact, she is liberated from the need to fall in love with anybody; ‘The war knocked all that nonsense out of my head’. Lucilla and Jane can make friends with her with clear consciences. But the strong-willed Jane is so determined to lead her own life that she erects barriers to the fulfilment of her St John’s Eve vision. Gladys, the man-eating servant girl, one of the funniest characters in the book, does her best to open her employers’ eyes to the realities of sexual attraction: ‘Have you seen the new baker’s boy? … blue eyes and golden curls, six feet high and four medals, and he can talk French’. Gladys, according to the housekeeper, is ‘an epidemic … there ain’t no bounds to her’. She inscribes the initials of her conquests ‘in the back of me hymn book’, wears a transparent blouse, and points out that the sensitive Mr Dix has potential as ‘a goer’. But Jane remains distrustful of her own instincts until the denouement, when she realises that ‘the secret door’ John Rochester talks of is a metaphor for entry into a full and sexual life, and that the magic of St John’s Eve has its equivalent in the real world.

E. Nesbit, her health and energy almost spent, but her zest for life refuelled by the joy of her second marriage, poured much that was precious to her into The Lark. She was once a girl who cut up bedspreads to make pinafores, who sang folk songs and gathered flowers and went out boating, unchaperoned, with handsome young men. Like Jane, Nesbit had been ‘the girl we all kneel to’, and, as Jane says, ‘All old people don’t forget what it felt like to be young’. Well Hall had been the scene of suffering as well as delight. Nesbit’s last pregnancy had ended in a stillbirth there. Not long afterwards, her secretary Alice Hoatson had borne the second of two babies secretly fathered by Hubert Bland; both were brought up as E. Nesbit’s own, alongside the three surviving children of the marriage. Worse, Nesbit’s son Fabian died at Well Hall, choked on his vomit after an operation as a result of medical – and possibly maternal – negligence. Hubert had gone blind there, then died; Nesbit’s money had run out and her health had begun to fail. But in The Lark, she allows herself the indulgence of throwing such miseries out of the window. The only hint of wistfulness comes when Lucilla disguises herself as an elderly aunt, and finds to her dismay that she can no longer command the right sort of social attention. She is treated with ‘the impersonal, distant, half-pitying tribute of youth to age … and no amount of kindliness or courtesy can make up in our fellow-creatures for lack of interest’.

Nesbit’s friend Berta Ruck said of her that she loved ‘to dramatize the details of daily life. She herself called this trait the literary sense.’ The airy fantasy of The Lark is anchored by the solidity of such detail. ‘Drama, drama, keeps women going’, Nesbit told Ruck. She declared her last novel to be ‘jolly good stuff’, and so, indeed, it is.

Charlotte Moore

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 ball-room, 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, so 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.

"Of course not, she agreed; that would be dreadfully shocking. I quite see that, darling. But just to begin with—till you bring off your first great invention—so that your mind could be quite free for wheels and cogs and springs and strains and levers and things. Then afterwards, when your royalties begin to come in, you could repay her a thousandfold for any little help she’d been able to give you."

You’ve thought it all out very thoroughly, and you put it very convincingly, he said, and laughed again. But when I marry, my dear mother, I think it would be more interesting to be in love with my wife.

Then I’m afraid you’ll never marry, she said very gravely. You’re twenty-five, and you’ve never been in love yet.

You can’t possibly know that, he said quickly. And still more quickly she answered:

You can’t possibly deny it.

He could not, it was true. There seemed to be nothing to do but to laugh again. So he laughed. Then he said:

Then the time must soon come when I shall.

I don’t think so, said his mother, speaking as one who knows. "Your dear father once told me he had never been in love in his life. Of course, he led me to believe otherwise when we first became engaged, and it is true that he was in one of his tempers when he said it. But it was true for all that. I knew it was true before he said it, if you understand, only until he