‘I love my little baby bear,I love his nose and toes and hair;I like to hold him in my arm,And keep him VERY safe and warm.’
And when she said ‘very’, of course there was a real bear’s hug.
Then came the eel, and the Lamb was tickled till he wriggled exactly like a real one:
‘I love my little baby eel,He is so squidglety to feel;He’ll be an eel when he is big—But now he’s just—a—tiny SNIG!’
Perhaps you didn’t know that a snig was a baby eel? It is, though, and the Lamb knew it.
‘Hedgehog now-!’ he said; and Anthea went on:
‘My baby hedgehog, how I like ye,Though your back’s so prickly-spiky;Your front is very soft, I’ve found,So I must love you front ways round!’
And then she loved him front ways round, while he squealed with pleasure.
It is a very baby game, and, of course, the rhymes are only meant for very, very small people—not for people who are old enough to read books, so I won’t tell you any more of them.
By the time the Lamb had been a baby lion and a baby weazel, and a baby rabbit and a baby rat, mother was ready; and she and the Lamb, having been kissed by everybody and hugged as thoroughly as it is possible to be when you’re dressed for out-of-doors, were seen to the tram by the boys. When the boys came back, every one looked at every one else and said—
‘Now!’
They locked the front door and they locked the back door, and they fastened all the windows. They moved the table and chairs off the carpet, and Anthea swept it.
‘We must show it a LITTLE attention,’ she said kindly. ‘We’ll give it tea-leaves next time. Carpets like tea-leaves.’
Then every one put on its out-door things, because as Cyril said, they didn’t know where they might be going, and it makes people stare if you go out of doors in November in pinafores and without hats.
Then Robert gently awoke the Phoenix, who yawned and stretched itself, and allowed Robert to lift it on to the middle of the carpet, where it instantly went to sleep again with its crested head tucked under its golden wing as before. Then every one sat down on the carpet.
‘Where shall we go?’ was of course the question, and it was warmly discussed. Anthea wanted to go to Japan. Robert and Cyril voted for America, and Jane wished to go to the seaside.
‘Because there are donkeys there,’ said she.
‘Not in November, silly,’ said Cyril; and the discussion got warmer and warmer, and still nothing was settled.
‘I vote we let the Phoenix decide,’ said Robert, at last. So they stroked it till it woke. ‘We want to go somewhere abroad,’ they said, ‘and we can’t make up our minds where.’
‘Let the carpet make up ITS mind, if it has one,’ said the Phoenix.
‘Just say you wish to go abroad.’
So they did; and the next moment the world seemed to spin upside down, and when it was right way up again and they were ungiddy enough to look about them, they were out of doors.
Out of doors—this is a feeble way to express where they were. They were out of—out of the earth, or off it. In fact, they were floating steadily, safely, splendidly, in the crisp clear air, with the pale bright blue of the sky above them, and far down below the pale bright sun-diamonded waves of the sea. The carpet had stiffened itself somehow, so that it was square and firm like a raft, and it steered itself so beautifully and kept on its way so flat and fearless that no one was at all afraid of tumbling off. In front of them lay land.
‘The coast of France,’ said the Phoenix, waking up and pointing with its wing. ‘Where do you wish to go? I should always keep one wish, of course—for emergencies—otherwise you may get into an emergency from which you can’t emerge at all.’
But the children were far too deeply interested to listen.
‘I tell you what,’ said Cyril: ‘let’s let the thing go on and on, and when we see a place we really want to stop at—why, we’ll just stop. Isn’t this ripping?’
‘It’s like trains,’ said Anthea, as they swept over the low-lying coast-line and held a steady course above orderly fields and straight roads bordered with poplar trees—‘like express trains, only in trains you never can see anything because of grown-ups wanting the windows shut; and then they breathe on them, and it’s like ground glass, and nobody can see anything, and then they go to sleep.’
‘It’s like tobogganing,’ said Robert, ‘so fast and smooth, only there’s no door-mat to stop short on—it goes on and on.’
‘You darling Phoenix,’ said Jane, ‘it’s all your doing. Oh, look at that ducky little church and the women with flappy cappy things on their heads.’
‘Don’t mention it,’ said the Phoenix, with sleepy politeness.
‘OH!’ said Cyril, summing up all the rapture that was in every heart. ‘Look at it all—look at it—and think of the Kentish Town Road!’
Every one looked and every one thought. And the glorious, gliding, smooth, steady rush went on, and they looked down on strange and beautiful things, and held their breath and let it go in deep sighs, and said ‘Oh!’ and ‘Ah!’ till it was long past dinner-time.
It was Jane who suddenly said, ‘I wish we’d brought that jam tart and cold mutton with us. It would have been jolly to have a picnic in the air.’
The jam tart and cold mutton were, however, far away, sitting quietly in the larder of the house in Camden Town which the children were supposed to be keeping. A mouse was at that moment tasting the outside of the raspberry jam part of the tart (she had nibbled a sort of gulf, or bay, through the pastry edge) to see whether it was the sort of dinner she could ask her little mouse-husband to sit down to. She had had a very good dinner herself. It is an ill wind that blows nobody any good.
‘We’ll stop as soon as we see a nice place,’ said Anthea. ‘I’ve got threepence, and you boys have the fourpence each that your trams didn’t cost the other day, so we can buy things to eat. I expect the Phoenix can speak French.’
The carpet was sailing along over rocks and rivers and trees and towns and farms and fields. It reminded everybody of a certain time when all of them had had wings, and had flown up to the top of a church tower, and had had a feast there of chicken and tongue and new bread and soda-water. And this again reminded them how hungry they were. And just as they were all being reminded of this very strongly indeed, they saw ahead of them some ruined walls on a hill, and strong and upright, and really, to look at, as good as new—a great square tower.
‘The top of that’s just the exactly same size as the carpet,’ said Jane. ‘Ithink it would be good to go to the top of that, because then none of the Abby-what’s-its-names—I mean natives—would be able to take the carpet away even if they wanted to. And some of us could go out and get things to eat—buy them honestly, I mean, not take them out of larder windows.’
‘I think it would be better if we went—’ Anthea was beginning; but Jane suddenly clenched her hands.
‘I don’t see why I should never do anything I want, just because I’m the youngest. I wish the carpet would fit itself in at the top of that tower—so there!’
The carpet made a disconcerting bound, and next moment it was hovering above the square top of the tower. Then slowly and carefully it began to sink under them. It was like a lift going down with you at the Army and Navy Stores.
‘I don’t think we ought to wish things without all agreeing to them first,’ said Robert, huffishly. ‘Hullo! What on earth?’
For unexpectedly and greyly something was coming up all round the four sides of the carpet. It was as if a wall were being built by magic quickness. It was a foot high—it was two feet high—three, four, five. It was shutting out the light—more and more.
Anthea looked up at the sky and the walls that now rose six feet above them.
‘We’re dropping into the tower,’ she screamed. ‘THERE WASN’T ANY TOP TO IT. So the carpet’s going to fit itself in at the bottom.’
Robert sprang to his feet.
‘We ought to have—Hullo! an owl’s nest.’ He put his knee on a jutting smooth piece of grey stone, and reached his hand into a deep window slit—broad to the inside of the tower, and narrowing like a funnel to the outside.
‘Look sharp!’ cried every one, but Robert did not look sharp enough. By the time he had drawn his hand out of the owl’s nest—there were no eggs there—the carpet had sunk eight feet below him.
‘Jump, you silly cuckoo!’ cried Cyril, with brotherly anxiety.
But Robert couldn’t turn round all in a minute into a jumping position. He wriggled and twisted and got on to the broad ledge, and by the time he was ready to jump the walls of the tower had risen up thirty feet above the others, who were still sinking with the carpet, and Robert found himself in the embrasure of a window; alone, for even the owls were not at home that day. The wall was smoothish; there was no climbing up, and as for climbing down—Robert hid his face in his hands, and squirmed back and back from the giddy verge, until the back part of him was wedged quite tight in the narrowest part of the window slit.
He was safe now, of course, but the outside part of his window was like a frame to a picture of part of the other side of the tower. It was very pretty, with moss growing between the stones and little shiny gems; but between him and it there was the width of the tower, and nothing in it but empty air. The situation was terrible. Robert saw in a flash that the carpet was likely to bring them into just the same sort of tight places that they used to get into with the wishes the Psammead granted them.
And the others—imagine their feelings as the carpet sank slowly and steadily to the very bottom of the tower, leaving Robert clinging to the wall. Robert did not even try to imagine their feelings—he had quite enough to do with his own; but you can.
As soon as the carpet came to a stop on the ground at the bottom of the inside of the tower it suddenly lost that raft-like stiffness which had been such a comfort during the journey from Camden Town to the topless tower, and spread itself limply over the loose stones and little earthy mounds at the bottom of the tower, just exactly like any ordinary carpet. Also it shrank suddenly, so that it seemed to draw away from under their feet, and they stepped quickly off the edges and stood on the firm ground, while the carpet drew itself in till it was its proper size, and no longer fitted exactly into the inside of the tower, but left quite a big space all round it.
Then across the carpet they looked at each other, and then every chin was tilted up and every eye sought vainly to see where poor Robert had got to. Of course, they couldn’t see him.
‘I wish we hadn’t come,’ said Jane.
‘You always do,’ said Cyril, briefly. ‘Look here, we can’t leave Robert up there. I wish the carpet would fetch him down.’
The carpet seemed to awake from a dream and pull itself together. It stiffened itself briskly and floated up between the four walls of the tower. The children below craned their heads back, and nearly broke their necks in doing it. The carpet rose and rose. It hung poised darkly above them for an anxious moment or two; then it dropped down again, threw itself on the uneven floor of the tower, and as it did so it tumbled Robert out on the uneven floor of the tower.
‘Oh, glory!’ said Robert, ‘that was a squeak. You don’t know how I felt. I say, I’ve had about enough for a bit. Let’s wish ourselves at home again and have a go at that jam tart and mutton. We can go out again afterwards.’
‘Righto!’ said every one, for the adventure had shaken the nerves of all. So they all got on to the carpet again, and said—
‘I wish we were at home.’
And lo and behold, they were no more at home than before. The carpet never moved. The Phoenix had taken the opportunity to go to sleep. Anthea woke it up gently.
‘Look here,’ she said.
‘I’m looking,’ said the Phoenix.
‘We WISHED to be at home, and we’re still here,’ complained Jane.
‘No,’ said the Phoenix, looking about it at the high dark walls of the tower. ‘No; I quite see that.’
‘But we wished to be at home,’ said Cyril.
‘No doubt,’ said the bird, politely.
‘And the carpet hasn’t moved an inch,’ said Robert.
‘No,’ said the Phoenix, ‘I see it hasn’t.’
‘But I thought it was a wishing carpet?’
‘So it is,’ said the Phoenix.
‘Then why—?’ asked the children, altogether.
‘I did tell you, you know,’ said the Phoenix, ‘only you are so fond of listening to the music of your own voices. It is, indeed, the most lovely music to each of us, and therefore—’
‘You did tell us WHAT?’ interrupted an Exasperated.
‘Why, that the carpet only gives you three wishes a day and YOU’VE HAD THEM.’
There was a heartfelt silence.
‘Then how are we going to get home?’ said Cyril, at last.
‘I haven’t any idea,’ replied the Phoenix, kindly. ‘Can I fly out and get you any little thing?’
‘How could you carry the money to pay for it?’
‘It isn’t necessary. Birds always take what they want. It is not regarded as stealing, except in the case of magpies.’
The children were glad to find they had been right in supposing this to be the case, on the day when they had wings, and had enjoyed somebody else’s ripe plums.
‘Yes; let the Phoenix get us something to eat, anyway,’ Robert urged—’ (‘If it will be so kind you mean,’ corrected Anthea, in a whisper); ‘if it will be so kind, and we can be thinking while it’s gone.’
So the Phoenix fluttered up through the grey space of the tower and vanished at the top, and it was not till it had quite gone that Jane said—
‘Suppose it never comes back.’
It was not a pleasant thought, and though Anthea at once said, ‘Of course it will come back; I’m certain it’s a bird of its word,’ a further gloom was cast by the idea. For, curiously enough, there was no door to the tower, and all the windows were far, far too high to be reached by the most adventurous climber. It was cold, too, and Anthea shivered.
‘Yes,’ said Cyril, ‘it’s like being at the bottom of a well.’
The children waited in a sad and hungry silence, and got little stiff necks with holding their little heads back to look up the inside of the tall grey tower, to see if the Phoenix were coming.
At last it came. It looked very big as it fluttered down between the walls, and as it neared them the children saw that its bigness was caused by a basket of boiled chestnuts which it carried in one claw. In the other it held a piece of bread. And in its beak was a very large pear. The pear was juicy, and as good as a very small drink. When the meal was over every one felt better, and the question of how to get home was discussed without any disagreeableness. But no one could think of any way out of the difficulty, or even out of the tower; for the Phoenix, though its beak and claws had fortunately been strong enough to carry food for them, was plainly not equal to flying through the air with four well-nourished children.
‘We must stay here, I suppose,’ said Robert at last, ‘and shout out every now and then, and some one will hear us and bring ropes and ladders, and rescue us like out of mines; and they’ll get up a subscription to send us home, like castaways.’
‘Yes; but we shan’t be home before mother is, and then father’ll take away the carpet and say it’s dangerous or something,’ said Cyril.
‘I DO wish we hadn’t come,’ said Jane.
And every one else said ‘Shut up,’ except Anthea, who suddenly awoke the Phoenix and said—
‘Look here, I believe YOU can help us. Oh, I do wish you would!’
‘I will help you as far as lies in my power,’ said the Phoenix, at once. ‘What is it you want now?’
‘Why, we want to get home,’ said every one.
‘Oh,’ said the Phoenix. ‘Ah, hum! Yes. Home, you said? Meaning?’
‘Where we live—where we slept last night—where the altar is that your egg was hatched on.’
‘Oh, there!’ said the Phoenix. ‘Well, I’ll do my best.’ It fluttered on to the carpet and walked up and down for a few minutes in deep thought. Then it drew itself up proudly.
‘I CAN help you,’ it said. ‘I am almost sure I can help you. Unless I am grossly deceived I can help you. You won’t mind my leaving you for an hour or two?’ and without waiting for a reply it soared up through the dimness of the tower into the brightness above.
‘Now,’ said Cyril, firmly, ‘it said an hour or two. But I’ve read about captives and people shut up in dungeons and catacombs and things awaiting release, and I know each moment is an eternity. Those people always do something to pass the desperate moments. It’s no use our trying to tame spiders, because we shan’t have time.’
‘I HOPE not,’ said Jane, doubtfully.
‘But we ought to scratch our names on the stones or something.’
‘I say, talking of stones,’ said Robert, ‘you see that heap of stones against the wall over in that corner. Well, I’m certain there’s a hole in the wall there—and I believe it’s a door. Yes, look here—the stones are round like an arch in the wall; and here’s the hole—it’s all black inside.’
He had walked over to the heap as he spoke and climbed up to it—dislodged the top stone of the heap and uncovered a little dark space.
Next moment every one was helping to pull down the heap of stones, and very soon every one threw off its jacket, for it was warm work.
‘It IS a door,’ said Cyril, wiping his face, ‘and not a bad thing either, if—’
He was going to add ‘if anything happens to the Phoenix,’ but he didn’t for fear of frightening Jane. He was not an unkind boy when he had leisure to think of such things.
The arched hole in the wall grew larger and larger. It was very, very black, even compared with the sort of twilight at the bottom of the tower; it grew larger because the children kept pulling off the stones and throwing them down into another heap. The stones must have been there a very long time, for they were covered with moss, and some of them were stuck together by it. So it was fairly hard work, as Robert pointed out.
When the hole reached to about halfway between the top of the arch and the tower, Robert and Cyril let themselves down cautiously on the inside, and lit matches. How thankful they felt then that they had a sensible father, who did not forbid them to carry matches, as some boys’ fathers do. The father of Robert and Cyril only insisted on the matches being of the kind that strike only on the box.
‘It’s not a door, it’s a sort of tunnel,’ Robert cried to the girls, after the first match had flared up, flickered, and gone out. ‘Stand off—we’ll push some more stones down!’
They did, amid deep excitement. And now the stone heap was almost gone—and before them the girls saw the dark archway leading to unknown things. All doubts and fears as to getting home were forgotten in this thrilling moment. It was like Monte Cristo—it was like—
‘I say,’ cried Anthea, suddenly, ‘come out! There’s always bad air in places that have been shut up. It makes your torches go out, and then you die. It’s called fire-damp, I believe. Come out, I tell you.’
The urgency of her tone actually brought the boys out—and then every one took up its jacket and fanned the dark arch with it, so as to make the air fresh inside. When Anthea thought the air inside ‘must be freshened by now,’ Cyril led the way into the arch.
The girls followed, and Robert came last, because Jane refused to tail the procession lest ‘something’ should come in after her, and catch at her from behind. Cyril advanced cautiously, lighting match after match, and peering before him.
‘It’s a vaulting roof,’ he said, ‘and it’s all stone—all right, Panther, don’t keep pulling at my jacket! The air must be all right because of the matches, silly, and there are—look out—there are steps down.’
‘Oh, don’t let’s go any farther,’ said Jane, in an agony of reluctance (a very painful thing, by the way, to be in). ‘I’m sure there are snakes, or dens of lions, or something. Do let’s go back, and come some other time, with candles, and bellows for the fire-damp.’
‘Let me get in front of you, then,’ said the stern voice of Robert, from behind. ‘This is exactly the place for buried treasure, and I’m going on, anyway; you can stay behind if you like.’
And then, of course, Jane consented to go on.
So, very slowly and carefully, the children went down the steps—there were seventeen of them—and at the bottom of the steps were more passages branching four ways, and a sort of low arch on the right-hand side made Cyril wonder what it could be, for it was too low to be the beginning of another passage.
So he knelt down and lit a match, and stooping very low he peeped in.
‘There’s SOMETHING,’ he said, and reached out his hand. It touched something that felt more like a damp bag of marbles than anything else that Cyril had ever touched.
‘I believe it IS a buried treasure,’ he cried.
And it was; for even as Anthea cried, ‘Oh, hurry up, Squirrel—fetch it out!’ Cyril pulled out a rotting canvas bag—about as big as the paper ones the greengrocer gives you with Barcelona nuts in for sixpence.
‘There’s more of it, a lot more,’ he said.
As he pulled the rotten bag gave way, and the gold coins ran and span and jumped and bumped and chinked and clinked on the floor of the dark passage.
I wonder what you would say if you suddenly came upon a buried treasure? What Cyril said was, ‘Oh, bother—I’ve burnt my fingers!’ and as he spoke he dropped the match. ‘AND IT WAS THE LAST!’ he added.
There was a moment of desperate silence. Then Jane began to cry.
‘Don’t,’ said Anthea, ‘don’t, Pussy—you’ll exhaust the air if you cry. We can get out all right.’
‘Yes,’ said Jane, through her sobs, ‘and find the Phoenix has come back and gone away again—because it thought we’d gone home some other way, and—Oh, I WISH we hadn’t come.’
Every one stood quite still—only Anthea cuddled Jane up to her and tried to wipe her eyes in the dark.
‘D-DON’T,’ said Jane; ‘that’s my EAR—I’m not crying with my ears.’
‘Come, let’s get on out,’ said Robert; but that was not so easy, for no one could remember exactly which way they had come. It is very difficult to remember things in the dark, unless you have matches with you, and then of course it is quite different, even if you don’t strike one.
Every one had come to agree with Jane’s constant wish—and despair was making the darkness blacker than ever, when quite suddenly the floor seemed to tip up—and a strong sensation of being in a whirling lift came upon every one. All eyes were closed—one’s eyes always are in the dark, don’t you think? When the whirling feeling stopped, Cyril said ‘Earthquakes!’ and they all opened their eyes.
They were in their own dingy breakfast-room at home, and oh, how light and bright and safe and pleasant and altogether delightful it seemed after that dark underground tunnel! The carpet lay on the floor, looking as calm as though it had never been for an excursion in its life. On the mantelpiece stood the Phoenix, waiting with an air of modest yet sterling worth for the thanks of the children.
‘But how DID you do it?’ they asked, when every one had thanked the Phoenix again and again.
‘Oh, I just went and got a wish from your friend the Psammead.’
‘But how DID you know where to find it?’
‘I found that out from the carpet; these wishing creatures always know all about each other—they’re so clannish; like the Scots, you know—all related.’
‘But, the carpet can’t talk, can it?’
‘No.’
‘Then how—’
‘How did I get the Psammead’s address? I tell you I got it from the carpet.’
‘DID it speak then?’
‘No,’ said the Phoenix, thoughtfully, ‘it didn’t speak, but I gathered my information from something in its manner. I was always a singularly observant bird.’
It was not till after the cold mutton and the jam tart, as well as the tea and bread-and-butter, that any one found time to regret the golden treasure which had been left scattered on the floor of the underground passage, and which, indeed, no one had thought of till now, since the moment when Cyril burnt his fingers at the flame of the last match.
‘What owls and goats we were!’ said Robert. ‘Look how we’ve always wanted treasure—and now—’
‘Never mind,’ said Anthea, trying as usual to make the best of it. ‘We’ll go back again and get it all, and then we’ll give everybody presents.’
More than a quarter of an hour passed most agreeably in arranging what presents should be given to whom, and, when the claims of generosity had been satisfied, the talk ran for fifty minutes on what they would buy for themselves.
It was Cyril who broke in on Robert’s almost too technical account of the motor-car on which he meant to go to and from school—
‘There!’ he said. ‘Dry up. It’s no good. We can’t ever go back. We don’t know where it is.’
‘Don’t YOU know?’ Jane asked the Phoenix, wistfully.
‘Not in the least,’ the Phoenix replied, in a tone of amiable regret.
‘Then we’ve lost the treasure,’ said Cyril. And they had.
‘But we’ve got the carpet and the Phoenix,’ said Anthea.
‘Excuse me,’ said the bird, with an air of wounded dignity, ‘I do SO HATE to seem to interfere, but surely you MUST mean the Phoenix and the carpet?’
It was on a Saturday that the children made their first glorious journey on the wishing carpet. Unless you are too young to read at all, you will know that the next day must have been Sunday.
Sunday at 18, Camden Terrace, Camden Town, was always a very pretty day. Father always brought home flowers on Saturday, so that the breakfast-table was extra beautiful. In November, of course, the flowers were chrysanthemums, yellow and coppery coloured. Then there were always sausages on toast for breakfast, and these are rapture, after six days of Kentish Town Road eggs at fourteen a shilling.
On this particular Sunday there were fowls for dinner, a kind of food that is generally kept for birthdays and grand occasions, and there was an angel pudding, when rice and milk and oranges and white icing do their best to make you happy.
After dinner father was very sleepy indeed, because he had been working hard all the week; but he did not yield to the voice that said, ‘Go and have an hour’s rest.’ He nursed the Lamb, who had a horrid cough that cook said was whooping-cough as sure as eggs, and he said—
‘Come along, kiddies; I’ve got a ripping book from the library, called The Golden Age, and I’ll read it to you.’
Mother settled herself on the drawing-room sofa, and said she could listen quite nicely with her eyes shut. The Lamb snugged into the ‘armchair corner’ of daddy’s arm, and the others got into a happy heap on the hearth-rug. At first, of course, there were too many feet and knees and shoulders and elbows, but real comfort was actually settling down on them, and the Phoenix and the carpet were put away on the back top shelf of their minds (beautiful things that could be taken out and played with later), when a surly solid knock came at the drawing-room door. It opened an angry inch, and the cook’s voice said, ‘Please, m’, may I speak to you a moment?’
Mother looked at father with a desperate expression. Then she put her pretty sparkly Sunday shoes down from the sofa, and stood up in them and sighed.
‘As good fish in the sea,’ said father, cheerfully, and it was not till much later that the children understood what he meant.
Mother went out into the passage, which is called ‘the hall’, where the umbrella-stand is, and the picture of the ‘Monarch of the Glen’ in a yellow shining frame, with brown spots on the Monarch from the damp in the house before last, and there was cook, very red and damp in the face, and with a clean apron tied on all crooked over the dirty one that she had dished up those dear delightful chickens in. She stood there and she seemed to get redder and damper, and she twisted the corner of her apron round her fingers, and she said very shortly and fiercely—
‘If you please ma’am, I should wish to leave at my day month.’ Mother leaned against the hatstand. The children could see her looking pale through the crack of the door, because she had been very kind to the cook, and had given her a holiday only the day before, and it seemed so very unkind of the cook to want to go like this, and on a Sunday too.
‘Why, what’s the matter?’ mother said.
‘It’s them children,’ the cook replied, and somehow the children all felt that they had known it from the first. They did not remember having done anything extra wrong, but it is so frightfully easy to displease a cook. ‘It’s them children: there’s that there new carpet in their room, covered thick with mud, both sides, beastly yellow mud, and sakes alive knows where they got it. And all that muck to clean up on a Sunday! It’s not my place, and it’s not my intentions, so I don’t deceive you, ma’am, and but for them limbs, which they is if ever there was, it’s not a bad place, though I says it, and I wouldn’t wish to leave, but—’
‘I’m very sorry,’ said mother, gently. ‘I will speak to the children. And you had better think it over, and if you REALLY wish to go, tell me to-morrow.’
Next day mother had a quiet talk with cook, and cook said she didn’t mind if she stayed on a bit, just to see.
But meantime the question of the muddy carpet had been gone into thoroughly by father and mother. Jane’s candid explanation that the mud had come from the bottom of a foreign tower where there was buried treasure was received with such chilling disbelief that the others limited their defence to an expression of sorrow, and of a determination ‘not to do it again’. But father said (and mother agreed with him, because mothers have to agree with fathers, and not because it was her own idea) that children who coated a carpet on both sides with thick mud, and when they were asked for an explanation could only talk silly nonsense—that meant Jane’s truthful statement—were not fit to have a carpet at all, and, indeed, SHOULDN’T have one for a week!
So the carpet was brushed (with tea-leaves, too) which was the only comfort Anthea could think of, and folded up and put away in the cupboard at the top of the stairs, and daddy put the key in his trousers pocket. ‘Till Saturday,’ said he.
‘Never mind,’ said Anthea, ‘we’ve got the Phoenix.’
But, as it happened, they hadn’t. The Phoenix was nowhere to be found, and everything had suddenly settled down from the rosy wild beauty of magic happenings to the common damp brownness of ordinary November life in Camden Town—and there was the nursery floor all bare boards in the middle and brown oilcloth round the outside, and the bareness and yellowness of the middle floor showed up the blackbeetles with terrible distinctness, when the poor things came out in the evening, as usual, to try to make friends with the children. But the children never would.
The Sunday ended in gloom, which even junket for supper in the blue Dresden bowl could hardly lighten at all. Next day the Lamb’s cough was worse. It certainly seemed very whoopy, and the doctor came in his brougham carriage.
Every one tried to bear up under the weight of the sorrow which it was to know that the wishing carpet was locked up and the Phoenix mislaid. A good deal of time was spent in looking for the Phoenix.
‘It’s a bird of its word,’ said Anthea. ‘I’m sure it’s not deserted us. But you know it had a most awfully long fly from wherever it was to near Rochester and back, and I expect the poor thing’s feeling tired out and wants rest. I am sure we may trust it.’
The others tried to feel sure of this, too, but it was hard.
No one could be expected to feel very kindly towards the cook, since it was entirely through her making such a fuss about a little foreign mud that the carpet had been taken away.
‘She might have told us,’ said Jane, ‘and Panther and I would have cleaned it with tea-leaves.’
‘She’s a cantankerous cat,’ said Robert.
‘I shan’t say what I think about her,’ said Anthea, primly, ‘because it would be evil speaking, lying, and slandering.’
‘It’s not lying to say she’s a disagreeable pig, and a beastly blue-nosed Bozwoz,’ said Cyril, who had read The Eyes of Light, and intended to talk like Tony as soon as he could teach Robert to talk like Paul.
And all the children, even Anthea, agreed that even if she wasn’t a blue-nosed Bozwoz, they wished cook had never been born.
But I ask you to believe that they didn’t do all the things on purpose which so annoyed the cook during the following week, though I daresay the things would not have happened if the cook had been a favourite. This is a mystery. Explain it if you can. The things that had happened were as follows:
Sunday.—Discovery of foreign mud on both sides of the carpet.
Monday.—Liquorice put on to boil with aniseed balls in a saucepan. Anthea did this, because she thought it would be good for the Lamb’s cough. The whole thing forgotten, and bottom of saucepan burned out. It was the little saucepan lined with white that was kept for the baby’s milk.
Tuesday.—A dead mouse found in pantry. Fish-slice taken to dig grave with. By regrettable accident fish-slice broken. Defence: ‘The cook oughtn’t to keep dead mice in pantries.’
Wednesday.—Chopped suet left on kitchen table. Robert added chopped soap, but he says he thought the suet was soap too.
Thursday.—Broke the kitchen window by falling against it during a perfectly fair game of bandits in the area.
Friday.—Stopped up grating of kitchen sink with putty and filled sink with water to make a lake to sail paper boats in. Went away and left the tap running. Kitchen hearthrug and cook’s shoes ruined.
On Saturday the carpet was restored. There had been plenty of time during the week to decide where it should be asked to go when they did get it back.
Mother had gone over to granny’s, and had not taken the Lamb because he had a bad cough, which, cook repeatedly said, was whooping-cough as sure as eggs is eggs.
‘But we’ll take him out, a ducky darling,’ said Anthea. ‘We’ll take him somewhere where you can’t have whooping-cough. Don’t be so silly, Robert. If he DOES talk about it no one’ll take any notice. He’s always talking about things he’s never seen.’
So they dressed the Lamb and themselves in out-of-doors clothes, and the Lamb chuckled and coughed, and laughed and coughed again, poor dear, and all the chairs and tables were moved off the carpet by the boys, while Jane nursed the Lamb, and Anthea rushed through the house in one last wild hunt for the missing Phoenix.
‘It’s no use waiting for it,’ she said, reappearing breathless in the breakfast-room. ‘But I know it hasn’t deserted us. It’s a bird of its word.’
‘Quite so,’ said the gentle voice of the Phoenix from beneath the table.
Every one fell on its knees and looked up, and there was the Phoenix perched on a crossbar of wood that ran across under the table, and had once supported a drawer, in the happy days before the drawer had been used as a boat, and its bottom unfortunately trodden out by Raggett’s Really Reliable School Boots on the feet of Robert.
‘I’ve been here all the time,’ said the Phoenix, yawning politely behind its claw. ‘If you wanted me you should have recited the ode of invocation; it’s seven thousand lines long, and written in very pure and beautiful Greek.’
‘Couldn’t you tell it us in English?’ asked Anthea.
‘It’s rather long, isn’t it?’ said Jane, jumping the Lamb on her knee.
‘Couldn’t you make a short English version, like Tate and Brady?’
‘Oh, come along, do,’ said Robert, holding out his hand. ‘Come along, good old Phoenix.’
‘Good old BEAUTIFUL Phoenix,’ it corrected shyly.
‘Good old BEAUTIFUL Phoenix, then. Come along, come along,’ said Robert, impatiently, with his hand still held out.
The Phoenix fluttered at once on to his wrist.
‘This amiable youth,’ it said to the others, ‘has miraculously been able to put the whole meaning of the seven thousand lines of Greek invocation into one English hexameter—a little misplaced some of the words—but—
‘Oh, come along, come along, good old beautiful Phoenix!’
‘Not perfect, I admit—but not bad for a boy of his age.’
‘Well, now then,’ said Robert, stepping back on to the carpet with the golden Phoenix on his wrist.
‘You look like the king’s falconer,’ said Jane, sitting down on the carpet with the baby on her lap.
Robert tried to go on looking like it. Cyril and Anthea stood on the carpet.
‘We shall have to get back before dinner,’ said Cyril, ‘or cook will blow the gaff.’
‘She hasn’t sneaked since Sunday,’ said Anthea.
‘She—’ Robert was beginning, when the door burst open and the cook, fierce and furious, came in like a whirlwind and stood on the corner of the carpet, with a broken basin in one hand and a threat in the other, which was clenched.
‘Look ‘ere!’ she cried, ‘my only basin; and what the powers am I to make the beefsteak and kidney pudding in that your ma ordered for your dinners? You don’t deserve no dinners, so yer don’t.’
‘I’m awfully sorry, cook,’ said Anthea gently; ‘it was my fault, and I forgot to tell you about it. It got broken when we were telling our fortunes with melted lead, you know, and I meant to tell you.’
‘Meant to tell me,’ replied the cook; she was red with anger, and really I don’t wonder—‘meant to tell! Well,Imean to tell, too. I’ve held my tongue this week through, because the missus she said to me quiet like, “We mustn’t expect old heads on young shoulders,” but now I shan’t hold it no longer. There was the soap you put in our pudding, and me and Eliza never so much as breathed it to your ma—though well we might—and the saucepan, and the fish-slice, and—My gracious cats alive! what ‘ave you got that blessed child dressed up in his outdoors for?’
‘We aren’t going to take him out,’ said Anthea; ‘at least—’ She stopped short, for though they weren’t going to take him out in the Kentish Town Road, they certainly intended to take him elsewhere. But not at all where cook meant when she said ‘out’. This confused the truthful Anthea.
‘Out!’ said the cook, ‘that I’ll take care you don’t;’ and she snatched the Lamb from the lap of Jane, while Anthea and Robert caught her by the skirts and apron. ‘Look here,’ said Cyril, in stern desperation, ‘will you go away, and make your pudding in a pie-dish, or a flower-pot, or a hot-water can, or something?’
‘Not me,’ said the cook, briefly; ‘and leave this precious poppet for you to give his deathercold to.’
‘I warn you,’ said Cyril, solemnly. ‘Beware, ere yet it be too late.’
‘Late yourself the little popsey-wopsey,’ said the cook, with angry tenderness. ‘They shan’t take it out, no more they shan’t. And—Where did you get that there yellow fowl?’ She pointed to the Phoenix.
Even Anthea saw that unless the cook lost her situation the loss would be theirs.
‘I wish,’ she said suddenly, ‘we were on a sunny southern shore, where there can’t be any whooping-cough.’
She said it through the frightened howls of the Lamb, and the sturdy scoldings of the cook, and instantly the giddy-go-round-and-falling-lift feeling swept over the whole party, and the cook sat down flat on the carpet, holding the screaming Lamb tight to her stout print-covered self, and calling on St Bridget to help her. She was an Irishwoman.
The moment the tipsy-topsy-turvy feeling stopped, the cook opened her eyes, gave one sounding screech and shut them again, and Anthea took the opportunity to get the desperately howling Lamb into her own arms.
‘It’s all right,’ she said; ‘own Panther’s got you. Look at the trees, and the sand, and the shells, and the great big tortoises. Oh DEAR, how hot it is!’
It certainly was; for the trusty carpet had laid itself out on a southern shore that was sunny and no mistake, as Robert remarked. The greenest of green slopes led up to glorious groves where palm-trees and all the tropical flowers and fruits that you read of in Westward Ho! and Fair Play were growing in rich profusion. Between the green, green slope and the blue, blue sea lay a stretch of sand that looked like a carpet of jewelled cloth of gold, for it was not greyish as our northern sand is, but yellow and changing—opal-coloured like sunshine and rainbows. And at the very moment when the wild, whirling, blinding, deafening, tumbling upside-downness of the carpet-moving stopped, the children had the happiness of seeing three large live turtles waddle down to the edge of the sea and disappear in the water. And it was hotter than you can possibly imagine, unless you think of ovens on a baking-day.
Every one without an instant’s hesitation tore off its London-in-November outdoor clothes, and Anthea took off the Lamb’s highwayman blue coat and his three-cornered hat, and then his jersey, and then the Lamb himself suddenly slipped out of his little blue tight breeches and stood up happy and hot in his little white shirt.
‘I’m sure it’s much warmer than the seaside in the summer,’ said Anthea. ‘Mother always lets us go barefoot then.’
So the Lamb’s shoes and socks and gaiters came off, and he stood digging his happy naked pink toes into the golden smooth sand.
‘I’m a little white duck-dickie,’ said he—‘a little white duck-dickie what swims,’ and splashed quacking into a sandy pool.
‘Let him,’ said Anthea; ‘it can’t hurt him. Oh, how hot it is!’
The cook suddenly opened her eyes and screamed, shut them, screamed again, opened her eyes once more and said—
‘Why, drat my cats alive, what’s all this? It’s a dream, I expect.
Well, it’s the best I ever dreamed. I’ll look it up in the dream-book to-morrow. Seaside and trees and a carpet to sit on. I never did!’
‘Look here,’ said Cyril, ‘it isn’t a dream; it’s real.’
‘Ho yes!’ said the cook; ‘they always says that in dreams.’
‘It’s REAL, I tell you,’ Robert said, stamping his foot. ‘I’m not going to tell you how it’s done, because that’s our secret.’ He winked heavily at each of the others in turn. ‘But you wouldn’t go away and make that pudding, so we HAD to bring you, and I hope you like it.’
‘I do that, and no mistake,’ said the cook unexpectedly; ‘and it being a dream it don’t matter what I say; and I WILL say, if it’s my last word, that of all the aggravating little varmints—’ ‘Calm yourself, my good woman,’ said the Phoenix.
‘Good woman, indeed,’ said the cook; ‘good woman yourself’ Then she saw who it was that had spoken. ‘Well, if I ever,’ said she; ‘this is something like a dream! Yellow fowls a-talking and all! I’ve heard of such, but never did I think to see the day.’
‘Well, then,’ said Cyril, impatiently, ‘sit here and see the day now. It’s a jolly fine day. Here, you others—a council!’ They walked along the shore till they were out of earshot of the cook, who still sat gazing about her with a happy, dreamy, vacant smile.
‘Look here,’ said Cyril, ‘we must roll the carpet up and hide it, so that we can get at it at any moment. The Lamb can be getting rid of his whooping-cough all the morning, and we can look about; and if the savages on this island are cannibals, we’ll hook it, and take her back. And if not, we’ll LEAVE HER HERE.’
‘Is that being kind to servants and animals, like the clergyman said?’ asked Jane.
‘Nor she isn’t kind,’ retorted Cyril.
‘Well—anyway,’ said Anthea, ‘the safest thing is to leave the carpet there with her sitting on it. Perhaps it’ll be a lesson to her, and anyway, if she thinks it’s a dream it won’t matter what she says when she gets home.’
So the extra coats and hats and mufflers were piled on the carpet. Cyril shouldered the well and happy Lamb, the Phoenix perched on Robert’s wrist, and ‘the party of explorers prepared to enter the interior’.
The grassy slope was smooth, but under the trees there were tangled creepers with bright, strange-shaped flowers, and it was not easy to walk.
‘We ought to have an explorer’s axe,’ said Robert. ‘I shall ask father to give me one for Christmas.’
There were curtains of creepers with scented blossoms hanging from the trees, and brilliant birds darted about quite close to their faces.
‘Now, tell me honestly,’ said the Phoenix, ‘are there any birds here handsomer than I am? Don’t be afraid of hurting my feelings—I’m a modest bird, I hope.’
‘Not one of them,’ said Robert, with conviction, ‘is a patch upon you!’
‘I was never a vain bird,’ said the Phoenix, ‘but I own that you confirm my own impression. I will take a flight.’ It circled in the air for a moment, and, returning to Robert’s wrist, went on, ‘There is a path to the left.’
And there was. So now the children went on through the wood more quickly and comfortably, the girls picking flowers and the Lamb inviting the ‘pretty dickies’ to observe that he himself was a ‘little white real-water-wet duck!’
And all this time he hadn’t whooping-coughed once.
The path turned and twisted, and, always threading their way amid a tangle of flowers, the children suddenly passed a corner and found themselves in a forest clearing, where there were a lot of pointed huts—the huts, as they knew at once, of SAVAGES.
The boldest heart beat more quickly. Suppose they WERE cannibals. It was a long way back to the carpet.
‘Hadn’t we better go back?’ said Jane. ‘Go NOW,’ she said, and her voice trembled a little. ‘Suppose they eat us.’
‘Nonsense, Pussy,’ said Cyril, firmly. ‘Look, there’s a goat tied up. That shows they don’t eat PEOPLE.’
‘Let’s go on and say we’re missionaries,’ Robert suggested.
‘I shouldn’t advise THAT,’ said the Phoenix, very earnestly.
‘Why not?’
‘Well, for one thing, it isn’t true,’ replied the golden bird.
It was while they stood hesitating on the edge of the clearing that a tall man suddenly came out of one of the huts. He had hardly any clothes, and his body all over was a dark and beautiful coppery colour—just like the chrysanthemums father had brought home on Saturday. In his hand he held a spear. The whites of his eyes and the white of his teeth were the only light things about him, except that where the sun shone on his shiny brown body it looked white, too. If you will look carefully at the next shiny savage you meet with next to nothing on, you will see at once—if the sun happens to be shining at the time—that I am right about this.
The savage looked at the children. Concealment was impossible. He uttered a shout that was more like ‘Oo goggery bag-wag’ than anything else the children had ever heard, and at once brown coppery people leapt out of every hut, and swarmed like ants about the clearing. There was no time for discussion, and no one wanted to discuss anything, anyhow. Whether these coppery people were cannibals or not now seemed to matter very little.
Without an instant’s hesitation the four children turned and ran back along the forest path; the only pause was Anthea’s. She stood back to let Cyril pass, because he was carrying the Lamb, who screamed with delight. (He had not whooping-coughed a single once since the carpet landed him on the island.)
‘Gee-up, Squirrel; gee-gee,’ he shouted, and Cyril did gee-up. The path was a shorter cut to the beach than the creeper-covered way by which they had come, and almost directly they saw through the trees the shining blue-and-gold-and-opal of sand and sea.
‘Stick to it,’ cried Cyril, breathlessly.
They did stick to it; they tore down the sands—they could hear behind them as they ran the patter of feet which they knew, too well, were copper-coloured.
The sands were golden and opal-coloured—and BARE. There were wreaths of tropic seaweed, there were rich tropic shells of the kind you would not buy in the Kentish Town Road under at least fifteen pence a pair. There were turtles basking lumpily on the water’s edge—but no cook, no clothes, and no carpet.
‘On, on! Into the sea!’ gasped Cyril. ‘They MUST hate water. I’ve—heard—savages always—dirty.’
Their feet were splashing in the warm shallows before his breathless words were ended. The calm baby-waves were easy to go through. It is warm work running for your life in the tropics, and the coolness of the water was delicious. They were up to their arm-pits now, and Jane was up to her chin.
‘Look!’ said the Phoenix. ‘What are they pointing at?’
The children turned; and there, a little to the west was a head—a head they knew, with a crooked cap upon it. It was the head of the cook.
For some reason or other the savages had stopped at the water’s edge and were all talking at the top of their voices, and all were pointing copper-coloured fingers, stiff with interest and excitement, at the head of the cook.
The children hurried towards her as quickly as the water would let them.
‘What on earth did you come out here for?’ Robert shouted; ‘and where on earth’s the carpet?’
‘It’s not on earth, bless you,’ replied the cook, happily; ‘it’s UNDER ME—in the water. I got a bit warm setting there in the sun, and I just says, “I wish I was in a cold bath”—just like that—and next minute here I was! It’s all part of the dream.’
Every one at once saw how extremely fortunate it was that the carpet had had the sense to take the cook to the nearest and largest bath—the sea, and how terrible it would have been if the carpet had taken itself and her to the stuffy little bath-room of the house in Camden Town!
‘Excuse me,’ said the Phoenix’s soft voice, breaking in on the general sigh of relief, ‘but I think these brown people want your cook.’
‘To—to eat?’ whispered Jane, as well as she could through the water which the plunging Lamb was dashing in her face with happy fat hands and feet.
‘Hardly,’ rejoined the bird. ‘Who wants cooks to EAT? Cooks are ENGAGED, not eaten. They wish to engage her.’
‘How can you understand what they say?’ asked Cyril, doubtfully.
‘It’s as easy as kissing your claw,’ replied the bird. ‘I speak and understand ALL languages, even that of your cook, which is difficult and unpleasing. It’s quite easy, when you know how it’s done. It just comes to you. I should advise you to beach the carpet and land the cargo—the cook, I mean. You can take my word for it, the copper-coloured ones will not harm you now.’
It is impossible not to take the word of a Phoenix when it tells you to. So the children at once got hold of the corners of the carpet, and, pulling it from under the cook, towed it slowly in through the shallowing water, and at last spread it on the sand. The cook, who had followed, instantly sat down on it, and at once the copper-coloured natives, now strangely humble, formed a ring round the carpet, and fell on their faces on the rainbow-and-gold sand. The tallest savage spoke in this position, which must have been very awkward for him; and Jane noticed that it took him quite a long time to get the sand out of his mouth afterwards.
‘He says,’ the Phoenix remarked after some time, ‘that they wish to engage your cook permanently.’
‘Without a character?’ asked Anthea, who had heard her mother speak of such things.
‘They do not wish to engage her as cook, but as queen; and queens need not have characters.’
There was a breathless pause.
‘WELL,’ said Cyril, ‘of all the choices! But there’s no accounting for tastes.’
Every one laughed at the idea of the cook’s being engaged as queen; they could not help it.
‘I do not advise laughter,’ warned the Phoenix, ruffling out his golden feathers, which were extremely wet. ‘And it’s not their own choice. It seems that there is an ancient prophecy of this copper-coloured tribe that a great queen should some day arise out of the sea with a white crown on her head, and—and—well, you see! There’s the crown!’
It pointed its claw at cook’s cap; and a very dirty cap it was, because it was the end of the week.
‘That’s the white crown,’ it said; ‘at least, it’s nearly white—very white indeed compared to the colour THEY are—and anyway, it’s quite white enough.’
Cyril addressed the cook. ‘Look here!’ said he, ‘these brown people want you to be their queen. They’re only savages, and they don’t know any better. Now would you really like to stay? or, if you’ll promise not to be so jolly aggravating at home, and not to tell any one a word about to-day, we’ll take you back to Camden Town.’
‘No, you don’t,’ said the cook, in firm, undoubting tones. ‘I’ve always wanted to be the Queen, God bless her! and I always thought what a good one I should make; and now I’m going to. IF it’s only in a dream, it’s well worth while. And I don’t go back to that nasty underground kitchen, and me blamed for everything; that I don’t, not till the dream’s finished and I wake up with that nasty bell a rang-tanging in my ears—so I tell you.’
‘Are you SURE,’ Anthea anxiously asked the Phoenix, ‘that she will be quite safe here?’
‘She will find the nest of a queen a very precious and soft thing,’ said the bird, solemnly.
‘There—you hear,’ said Cyril. ‘You’re in for a precious soft thing, so mind you’re a good queen, cook. It’s more than you’d any right to expect, but long may you reign.’
Some of the cook’s copper-coloured subjects now advanced from the forest with long garlands of beautiful flowers, white and sweet-scented, and hung them respectfully round the neck of their new sovereign.
‘What! all them lovely bokays for me!’ exclaimed the enraptured cook. ‘Well, this here is something LIKE a dream, I must say.’
She sat up very straight on the carpet, and the copper-coloured ones, themselves wreathed in garlands of the gayest flowers, madly stuck parrot feathers in their hair and began to dance. It was a dance such as you have never seen; it made the children feel almost sure that the cook was right, and that they were all in a dream. Small, strange-shaped drums were beaten, odd-sounding songs were sung, and the dance got faster and faster and odder and odder, till at last all the dancers fell on the sand tired out.
The new queen, with her white crown-cap all on one side, clapped wildly.
‘Brayvo!’ she cried, ‘brayvo! It’s better than the Albert Edward Music-hall in the Kentish Town Road. Go it again!’
But the Phoenix would not translate this request into the copper-coloured language; and when the savages had recovered their breath, they implored their queen to leave her white escort and come with them to their huts.
‘The finest shall be yours, O queen,’ said they.
‘Well—so long!’ said the cook, getting heavily on to her feet, when the Phoenix had translated this request. ‘No more kitchens and attics for me, thank you. I’m off to my royal palace, I am; and I only wish this here dream would keep on for ever and ever.’
She picked up the ends of the garlands that trailed round her feet, and the children had one last glimpse of her striped stockings and worn elastic-side boots before she disappeared into the shadow of the forest, surrounded by her dusky retainers, singing songs of rejoicing as they went.
‘WELL!’ said Cyril, ‘I suppose she’s all right, but they don’t seem to count us for much, one way or the other.’
‘Oh,’ said the Phoenix, ‘they think you’re merely dreams. The prophecy said that the queen would arise from the waves with a white crown and surrounded by white dream-children. That’s about what they think YOU are!’
‘And what about dinner?’ said Robert, abruptly.
‘There won’t be any dinner, with no cook and no pudding-basin,’ Anthea reminded him; ‘but there’s always bread-and-butter.’
‘Let’s get home,’ said Cyril.
The Lamb was furiously unwishful to be dressed in his warm clothes again, but Anthea and Jane managed it, by force disguised as coaxing, and he never once whooping-coughed.
Then every one put on its own warm things and took its place on the carpet.
A sound of uncouth singing still came from beyond the trees where the copper-coloured natives were crooning songs of admiration and respect to their white-crowned queen. Then Anthea said ‘Home,’ just as duchesses and other people do to their coachmen, and the intelligent carpet in one whirling moment laid itself down in its proper place on the nursery floor. And at that very moment Eliza opened the door and said—
‘Cook’s gone! I can’t find her anywhere, and there’s no dinner ready. She hasn’t taken her box nor yet her outdoor things. She just ran out to see the time, I shouldn’t wonder—the kitchen clock never did give her satisfaction—and she’s got run over or fell down in a fit as likely as not. You’ll have to put up with the cold bacon for your dinners; and what on earth you’ve got your outdoor things on for I don’t know. And then I’ll slip out and see if they know anything about her at the police-station.’
But nobody ever knew anything about the cook any more, except the children, and, later, one other person.
Mother was so upset at losing the cook, and so anxious about her, that Anthea felt most miserable, as though she had done something very wrong indeed. She woke several times in the night, and at last decided that she would ask the Phoenix to let her tell her mother all about it. But there was no opportunity to do this next day, because the Phoenix, as usual, had gone to sleep in some out-of-the-way spot, after asking, as a special favour, not to be disturbed for twenty-four hours.
The Lamb never whooping-coughed once all that Sunday, and mother and father said what good medicine it was that the doctor had given him. But the children knew that it was the southern shore where you can’t have whooping-cough that had cured him. The Lamb babbled of coloured sand and water, but no one took any notice of that. He often talked of things that hadn’t happened.
It was on Monday morning, very early indeed, that Anthea woke and suddenly made up her mind. She crept downstairs in her night-gown (it was very chilly), sat down on the carpet, and with a beating heart wished herself on the sunny shore where you can’t have whooping-cough, and next moment there she was.
The sand was splendidly warm. She could feel it at once, even through the carpet. She folded the carpet, and put it over her shoulders like a shawl, for she was determined not to be parted from it for a single instant, no matter how hot it might be to wear.