Then Dora said, ‘Yes, but look here. Now we’re together I do want to say something. What about the Wouldbegoods Society?’
Many of us groaned, and one said, ‘Hear! hear!’ I will not say which one, but it was not Oswald.
‘No, but really,’ Dora said, ‘I don’t want to be preachy—but you know we DID say we’d try to be good. And it says in a book I was reading only yesterday that NOT being naughty is not enough. You must BE good. And we’ve hardly done anything. The Golden Deed book’s almost empty.’
‘Couldn’t we have a book of leaden deeds?’ said Noel, coming out of his poetry, ‘then there’d be plenty for Alice to write about if she wants to, or brass or zinc or aluminium deeds? We shan’t ever fill the book with golden ones.’
H. O. had rolled himself in the red tablecloth and said Noel was only advising us to be naughty, and again peace waved in the balance. But Alice said, ‘Oh, H. O., DON’T—he didn’t mean that; but really and truly, I wish wrong things weren’t so interesting. You begin to do a noble act, and then it gets so exciting, and before you know where you are you are doing something wrong as hard as you can lick.’
‘And enjoying it too’ Dick said.
‘It’s very curious,’ Denny said, ‘but you don’t seem to be able to be certain inside yourself whether what you’re doing is right if you happen to like doing it, but if you don’t like doing it you know quite well. I only thought of that just now. I wish Noel would make a poem about it.’
‘I am,’ Noel said; ‘it began about a crocodile but it is finishing itself up quite different from what I meant it to at first. Just wait a minute.’
He wrote very hard while his kind brothers and sisters and his little friends waited the minute he had said, and then he read:
‘The crocodile is very wise,
He lives in the Nile with little eyes,
He eats the hippopotamus too,
And if he could he would eat up you.
‘The lovely woods and starry skies
He looks upon with glad surprise!
He sees the riches of the east,
And the tiger and lion, kings of beast.
‘So let all be good and beware
Of saying shan’t and won’t and don’t care;
For doing wrong is easier far
Than any of the right things I know about are.