"And we shall 'ave the fairest flowers of hill and dale," said Dickie, whispering comfortably in his dirty sheets, "and greensward. Oh! Tinkler dear, 'twill indeed be a fair scene. The gayest colors of the rainbow amid the Ague Able green of fresh leaves. I do love the Man Next Door. He has indeed a 'art of gold."
That was how Dickie talked to his friend Tinkler. You know how he talked to his aunt and the Man Next Door. I wonder whether you know that most children can speak at least two languages, even if they have never had a foreign nurse or been to foreign climes – or whether you think that you are the only child who can do this.
Believe me, you are not. Parents and guardians would be surprised to learn that dear little Charlie has a language quite different from the one he uses to them – a language in which he talks to the cook and the housemaid. And yet another language – spoken with the real accent too – in which he converses with the boot-boy and the grooms.
Dickie, however, had learned his second language from books. The teacher at his school had given him six – "Children of the New Forest," "Quentin Durward," "Hereward the Wake," and three others – all paper-backed. They made a new world for Dickie. And since the people in books talked in this nice, if odd, way, he saw no reason why he should not – to a friend whom he could trust.
I hope you're not getting bored with all this.
You see, I must tell you a little about the kind of boy Dickie was and the kind of way he lived, or you won't understand his adventures. And he had adventures – no end of adventures – as you will see presently.
Dickie woke, gay as the spring sun that was trying to look in at him through his grimy windows.
"Perhaps he'll do some more to the garden to-day!" he said, and got up very quickly.
He got up in the dirty, comfortless room and dressed himself. But in the evening he was undressed by kind, clean hands, and washed in a big bath half-full of hot, silvery water, with soap that smelled like the timber-yard at the end of the street. Because, going along to school, with his silly little head full of Artistic Bird Seeds and flowers rainbow-colored, he had let his crutch slip on a banana-skin and had tumbled down, and a butcher's cart had gone over his poor lame foot. So they took the hurt foot to the hospital, and of course he had to go with it, and the hospital was much more like the heaven he read of in his books than anything he had ever come across before.
He noticed that the nurses and the doctors spoke in the kind of words that he had found in his books, and in a voice that he had not found anywhere; so when on the second day a round-faced, smiling lady in a white cap said, "Well, Tommy, and how are we to-day?" he replied —
"My name is far from being Tommy, and I am in Lux Ury and Af Fluence, I thank you, gracious lady."
At which the lady laughed and pinched his cheek.
When she grew to know him better, and found out where he had learned to talk like that, she produced more books. And from them he learned more new words. They were very nice to him at the hospital, but when they sent him home they put his lame foot into a thick boot with a horrid, clumpy sole and iron things that went up his leg.
His aunt and her friends said, "How kind!" but Dickie hated it. The boys at school made game of it – they had got used to the crutch – and that was worse than being called "Old Dot-and-go-one," which was what Dickie had got used to – so used that it seemed almost like a pet name.
And on that first night of his return he found that he had been robbed. They had taken his Tinkler from the safe corner in his bed where the ticking was broken, and there was a soft flock nest for a boy's best friend.
He knew better than to ask what had become of it. Instead he searched and searched the house in all its five rooms. But he never found Tinkler.
Instead he found next day, when his aunt had gone out shopping, a little square of cardboard at the back of the dresser drawer, among the dirty dusters and clothes pegs and string and corks and novelettes.
It was a pawn-ticket – "Rattle. One shilling."
Dickie knew all about pawn-tickets. You, of course, don't. Well, ask some grown-up person to explain; I haven't time. I want to get on with the story.
Until he had found that ticket he had not been able to think of anything else. He had not even cared to think about his garden and wonder whether the Artistic Bird Seeds had come up parrot-colored. He had been a very long time in the hospital, and it was August now. And the nurses had assured him that the seeds must be up long ago – he would find everything flowering, you see if he didn't.
And now he went out to look. There was a tangle of green growth at the end of the garden, and the next garden was full of weeds. For the Man Next Door had gone off to look for work down Ashford way, where the hop-gardens are, and the house was to let.
A few poor little pink and yellow flowers showed stunted among the green where he had sowed the Artistic Bird Seed. And, towering high above everything else – oh, three times as high as Dickie himself – there was a flower – a great flower like a sunflower, only white.
"Why," said Dickie, "it's as big as a dinner-plate."
It was.
It stood up, beautiful and stately, and turned its cream-white face towards the sun.
"The stalk's like a little tree," said Dickie; and so it was.
It had great drooping leaves, and a dozen smaller white flowers stood out below it on long stalks, thinner than that needed to support the moonflower itself.
"It is a moonflower, of course," he said, "if the other kind's sunflowers. I love it! I love it! I love it!"
He did not allow himself much time for loving it, however; for he had business in hand. He had, somehow or other, to get a shilling. Because without a shilling he could not exchange that square of cardboard with "Rattle" on it for his one friend, Tinkler. And with the shilling he could. (This is part of the dismal magic of pawn-tickets which some grown-up will kindly explain to you.)
"I can't get money by the sweat of my brow," said Dickie to himself; "nobody would let me run their errands when they could get a boy with both legs to do them. Not likely. I wish I'd got something I could sell."
He looked round the yard – dirtier and nastier than ever now in the parts that the Man Next Door had not had time to dig. There was certainly nothing there that any one would want to buy, especially now the rabbit-hutch was gone. Except.. why, of course – the moonflowers!
He got the old worn-down knife out of the bowl on the back kitchen sink, where it nestled among potato peelings like a flower among foliage, and carefully cut half a dozen of the smaller flowers. Then he limped up to New Cross Station, and stood outside, leaning on his crutch, and holding out the flowers to the people who came crowding out of the station after the arrival of each train – thick, black crowds of tired people, in too great a hurry to get home to their teas to care much about him or his flowers. Everybody glanced at them, for they were wonderful flowers, as white as water-lilies, only flat – the real sunflower shape – and their centres were of the purest yellow gold color.
"Pretty, ain't they?" one black-coated person would say to another. And the other would reply —
"No. Yes. I dunno! Hurry up, can't you?"
It was no good. Dickie was tired, and the flowers were beginning to droop. He turned to go home, when a sudden thought brought the blood to his face. He turned again quickly and went straight to the pawnbroker's. You may be quite sure he had learned the address on the card by heart.
He went boldly into the shop, which had three handsome gold balls hanging out above its door, and in its window all sorts of pretty things – rings, and chains, and brooches, and watches, and china, and silk handkerchiefs,