Table of Contents
Praise
Title Page
Copyright Page
EDITH NESBIT
THE WORLD OF EDITH NESBIT AND THE ENCHANTED CASTLE AND FIVE CHILDREN AND IT
Introduction
FIVE CHILDREN AND IT
CHAPTER I - BEAUTIFUL AS THE DAY
CHAPTER II - GOLDEN GUINEAS
CHAPTER III - BEING WANTED
CHAPTER IV - WINGS
CHAPTER V - No WINGS
CHAPTER VI - A CASTLE AND NO DINNER
CHAPTER VII - A SIEGE AND BED
CHAPTER VIII - BIGGER THAN THE BAKER’S BOY
CHAPTER IX - GROWN UP
CHAPTER X - SCALPS
CHAPTER XI (AND LAST) - THE LAST WISH
THE ENCHANTED CASTLE
CHAPTER I
CHAPTER II
CHAPTER III - Those of my readers who have gone about much with an invisible ...
CHAPTER IV
CHAPTER V
CHAPTER VI
CHAPTER VII
CHAPTER VIII
CHAPTER IX
CHAPTER X
CHAPTER XI
CHAPTER XII
ENDNOTES
INSPIRED BY THE ENCHANTED CASTLE AND FIVE CHILDREN AND IT
COMMENTS & QUESTIONS
FOR FURTHER READING
FROM THE PAGES OF THE ENCHANTED CASTLE and FIVE CHILDREN AND ITThe children stood round the hole in a ring, looking at the creature they had found. It was worth looking at. Its eyes were on long horns like a snail’s eyes, and it could move them in and out like telescopes; it had ears like a bat’s ears, and its tubby body was shaped like a spider’s and covered with thick soft fur; its legs and arms were furry too, and it had hands and feet like a monkey’s.
(from Five Children and It, page 17)
I daresay you have often thought what you would do if you had three wishes given you, and have despised the old man and his wife in the black-pudding story, and felt certain that if you had the chance you could think of three really useful wishes without a moment’s hesitation. These children had often talked this matter over, but, now the chance had suddenly come to them, they could not make up their minds.
(from Five Children and It, pages 20-21)
“I was always generous from a child,” said the Sand-fairy. “I’ve spent the whole of my waking hours in giving. But one thing I won’t give—that’s advice.” (from Five Children and It, page 77)
“Friends, Romans, countrymen—and women—we found a Sammyadd. We have had wishes. We’ve had wings, and being beautiful as the day—ugh!—that was pretty jolly beastly if you like—and wealth and castles, and that rotten gipsy business with the Lamb. But we’re no forrader. We haven’t really got anything worth having for our wishes.”
(from Five Children and It, page 126)
“Why, don’t you see, if you told grown-ups I should have no peace of my life. They’d get hold of me, and they wouldn’t wish silly things like you do, but real earnest things; and the scientific people would hit on some way of making things last after sunset, as likely as not; and they’d ask for a graduated income-tax, and old-age pensions and manhood suffrage, and free secondary education, and dull things like that; and get them, and keep them, and the whole world would be turned topsy-turvy.”
(from Five Children and It, page 182)
And they were at school in a little town in the West of England—the boys at one school, of course, and the girl at another, because the sensible habit of having boys and girls at the same school is not yet as common as I hope it will be some day.
(from The Enchanted Castle, page 191)
“Well, don’t let’s spoil the show with any silly old not believing,” said Gerald with decision. “I’m going to believe in magic as hard as I can. This is an enchanted garden, and that’s an enchanted castle, and I’m jolly well going to explore.” (from The Enchanted Castle, page 204)
There is a curtain, thin as gossamer, clear as glass, strong as iron, that hangs for ever between the world of magic and the world that seems to us to be real. And when once people have found one of the little weak spots in that curtain which are marked by magic rings, and amulets, and the like, almost anything may happen.
(from The Enchanted Castle, page 345)
The moonbeam slants more and more; now it touches the far end of the stone, now it draws nearer and nearer to the middle of it, now at last it touches the very heart and centre of that central stone. And then it is as though a spring were touched, a fountain of light released. Everything changes. Or, rather, everything is revealed. There are no more secrets. The plan of the world seems plain, like an easy sum that one writes in big figures on a child’s slate.
(from The Enchanted Castle, page 409)
It is all very well for all of them to pretend that the whole of this story is my own invention: facts are facts, and you can’t explain them away.
(from The Enchanted Castle, page 412)
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Five Children and It was first published in 1902.
The Enchanted Castle was first published in 1907.
Published in 2005 by Barnes & Noble Classics with new
Introduction, Notes, Biography, Chronology, Inspired By,
Comments & Questions, and For Further Reading.
Introduction, Notes, and For Further Reading
Copyright © 2005 by Sanford Schwartz.
Note on Edith Nesbit, The World of Edith Nesbit,
Inspired by The Enchanted Castle and Five Children and It,
and Comments & Questions
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EDITH NESBIT
Edith Nesbit, a pioneer of twentieth-century children’s fiction, was one of the major authors of the “Golden Age” of children’s literature, which included Lewis Carroll, George MacDonald, Louisa May Alcott, Rudyard Kipling, Beatrix Potter, J. M. Barrie, Kenneth Grahame, and Frances Hodgson Burnett. She was born in 1858, the youngest of six children. Her childhood was disrupted in 1862 by the sudden death of her father, the head of a small agricultural college in South London. For several years, Edith’s mother ran the college on her own, but when Edith’s sister Mary contracted tuberculosis, Mrs. Nesbit began moving the family to various locations in England and France in an ultimately futile effort to find a suitable climate. The energetic and sometimes mischievous Edith was sent off intermittently to boarding schools, where she was often unhappy. At other times, she was allowed to roam freely through the countryside around the homes the family rented. She began publishing poetry in her teens, and though her lasting reputation is based on her children’s books, she aspired to become a major poet throughout her life.
In 1880 Edith married the dashing and politically active Hubert Bland and soon afterward gave birth to their first child. Four years later the couple joined Sidney and Beatrice Webb, George Bernard Shaw, and several others as founding members of the Fabian Society, an influential circle of progressive intellectuals who would play a major role in the formation of social policy over the coming decades; Bland edited the society’s journal. Since he was an uncertain breadwinner, Edith began to support the family by her writing. For nearly two decades she composed (in addition to her verse) a multitude of essays, short stories, adult novels, and tales for children, often working at top speed to keep the family afloat. At the same time, she adopted the image of the so-called New Woman, cutting her hair short, wearing loose-fitting “aesthetic” clothing, and assuming what was then the exclusively male prerogative of smoking cigarettes. Tall, athletic, and by all accounts highly attractive, she also responded to her husband’s incessant womanizing by conducting affairs of her own, including a short-lived romance with George Bernard Shaw.
After twenty years of prolific publication and modest critical success, Nesbit finally achieved acclaim with the release of her first children’s novel, The Story of the Treasure Seekers (1899), a family adventure story. It was the start of a remarkable period of creative activity. The Wouldbegoods, a sequel to her first novel, appeared in 1901, followed by The New Treasure Seekers (1904). During this time, she also wrote her first fantasy novel, Five Children and It (1902) and employed the same “five children” in two sequels, The Phoenix and the Carpet (1904) and The Story of the Amulet (1906). In 1906 she published one of her most enduring family adventure tales, The Railway Children, and in the following year The Enchanted Castle (1907), which many regard as her most mature work of children’s fiction. Inspired by H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine (1895), she then produced two time-travel romances for children, The House of Arden (1908) and its sequel, Harding’s Luck (1909), and several other works of fantasy—The Magic City (1910), The Wonderful Garden (1911), The Magic World (1912), and Wet Magic (1913). Her output declined dramatically after Hubert’s death in 1914. At the time of Edith Nesbit’s death, on May 4, 1924, her literary reputation had ebbed, but it recovered in the 1930s, and ever since she has been regarded as one of the seminal voices of modern children’s literature.
THE WORLD OF EDITH NESBIT AND THE ENCHANTED CASTLE AND FIVE CHILDREN AND IT
1858 Edith Nesbit is born on August 15 in Kennington, South Lon- don, the sixth and youngest child of John Collis and Sarah Green (nee Alderton) Nesbit. Her family lives on the campus of an agricultural school founded by Edith’s paternal grandfather; her father is the headmaster and teaches chemistry. 1862 In March, John Nesbit dies at the age of forty-three, and Edith’s mother takes over the running of the college. 1863 Charles Kingsley’s pioneering work of children’s fantasy The Water-Babies is published; along with subsequent books by Lewis Carroll and George MacDonald, it marks the beginning of a golden era of children’s fantasy and of children’s literature in general. 1865 Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland appears. 1866 Edith’s sister Mary contracts tuberculosis, and the family moves to the seaside in search of a healthier climate. Edith is briefly enrolled in boarding school, where she is bullied. 1867 Sarah Nesbit takes Mary and two of the other children, including Edith, to the warmer climate of France. The Nesbits travel throughout the country, never remaining in one place for long. 1868 The first part of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women appears. 1870 The Nesbit family moves to a Brittany farmhouse; the children are allowed to roam freely. A reluctant Edith is sent to various boarding schools and at one point a convent in Germany. Sarah Nesbit takes Mary back to London, where Mary becomes engaged to Philip Bourke Marston, a poet who is a member of the Pre-Raphaelite circle. 1871 In November, Mary Nesbit dies. George MacDonald publishes At the Back of the North Wind. Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There appears. 1872 The Nesbits settle in Kent, renting Halstead Hall, where the children find many diversions, including railroad tracks that run through the property. Edith enters a period of great happiness. MacDonald’s most enduring book for children, The Princess and the Goblin, is released. 1875 Edith’s first published poems appear in a local paper, the Sunday Magazine. The family moves back to London. 1876 Mark Twain publishes The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. 1877 Edith meets Hubert Bland, a young writer and political activist. 1880 Hubert Bland and Edith Nesbit are married. Their first child, Paul, is born two months later. 1881 A second child, Iris, is born. 1882 Nesbit meets Alice Hoatson, who will have an ongoing affair with Bland. 1883 Scottish novelist Robert Louis Stevenson publishes Treasure Island. George MacDonald publishes The Princess and Curdie. 1884 Bland and Nesbit help found the Fabian Society, a circle of progressive intellectuals committed to gradual social change through democratic reform. Nesbit is invited to write pamphlets for the group. The society attracts notable figures, including writers George Bernard Shaw and, later, H. G. Wells. Nesbit also adopts the image of the so-called New Woman of the late nineteenth century: She cuts her hair short, smokes cigarettes, and abandons her corset. Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is published. 1885 With Bland, Nesbit coauthors the novel The Prophet’s Mantle, a conventional romance plot set against a background of politics informed by their acquaintance with Russian émigrés living in London. When writing together, the couple often uses the alias “Fabian Bland.” The couple’s third child, Fabian, is born. 1886 Bland edits the Fabian Society journal, Today. His daughter Rosamund is born to Alice Hoatson; Nesbit agrees to raise the child as her own and allows Hoatson to move into the Bland-Nesbit home as a housekeeper. Nesbit has a brief affair with George Bernard Shaw. Lays and Legends, Nesbit’s collection of poems, is released to critical success. Frances Hodgson Burnett’s Little Lord Fauntleroy is published. 1892 Nesbit’s first long work for children, a book-length narrative poem entitled The Voyage of Columbus, is published. 1893 Nesbit publishes two collections of horror stories: Something Wrong and Grim Tales; the latter includes “Man-size in Marble,” one of her most popular tales. 1894 Rudyard Kipling publishes The Jungle Book, a collection of animal stories. Robert Louis Stevenson dies. 1895 H. G. Wells publishes The Time Machine, his first major work of science fiction. 1896 Nesbit begins to serialize her childhood reminiscences in The Girl’s Own Paper. 1898 H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds and Kenneth Grahame’s Dream Days are published. 1899 Nesbit begins her long collaboration with illustrator H. R. Millar when her dragon stories are published in The Strand Magazine. She also publishes Pussy and Doggy Tales, The Secret of Kyriels, an adult Gothic novel, and The Story of the Treasure Seekers, the first of the Bastable novels, with illustrations by Gordon Brown and Lewis Baumer. The success of The Treasure Seekers allows Nesbit and Bland to move into Well Hall, a spacious manor home. Bland’s second child with Alice Hoatson, christened John and nicknamed “The Lamb,” is born; Nesbit adopts and raises him. 1900 Nesbit publishes her dragon stories in the collection The Book of Dragons. L. Frank Baum publishes The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Beatrix Potter publishes The Tale of Peter Rabbit. 1901 The Wouldbegoods, another Bastable novel, is published, as is Nesbit’s Nine Unlikely Tales for Children (later reprinted as Whereyouwanttogo and Other Unlikely Tales). Kipling’s Kim appears. 1902 Nesbit publishes Five Children and It, her first fantasy novel. She meets H. G. Wells, an important influence on her fiction and for several years a controversial and outspoken member of the Fabian Society. Nesbit’s adult novel The Red House and The Revolt of the Toys, and What Comes of Quarreling are published. Kipling’s Just So Stories is released. 1904 The New Treasure Seekers (another Bastable novel) and The Phoenix and the Carpet, featuring the “five children,” are published. J. M. Barrie produces his play Peter Pan; or The Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up. 1905 Frances Hodgson Burnett’s A Little Princess appears. 1906 The Railway Children is published, drawing on Nesbit’s childhood at Halstead Hall. The Story of the Amulet, the last of the “five children” novels, is also released, as is another adult novel, The Incomplete Amorist. Kipling’s Puck of Pook’s Hill appears. 1907 The Enchanted Castle is published. 1908 Nesbit publishes her collected political poetry in Ballads and Lyrics of Socialism, 1883 to 1908. She introduces a new series with the publication of The House of Arden, a children’s time-travel romance. Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows is published. London hosts the Olympic Games. 1909 These Little Ones, a collection of Nesbit’s stories, and Harding’s Luck, a sequel to The House of Arden, are published, as well as two adult novels, Salome and the Head (reissued as The House with No Address) and Daphne in Fitzroy Street, based on her affair with George Bernard Shaw. 1910 Nesbit publishes The Magic City, with a character (the Pretenderette) that seems to lampoon a prominent suffragette, Evelyn Sharp, to whom Nesbit writes a letter explaining why she refuses to join the movement. 1911 Nesbit publishes The Wonderful Garden, another children’s fantasy novel, and Dormant, often considered her finest adult novel. Hubert Bland’s vision deteriorates, leaving him almost blind and in the care of his wife. Barrie’s story about Peter Pan is published as a children’s novel titled Peter and Wendy, which will later be changed to Peter Pan. Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden appears. 1912 Nesbit publishes The Magic World, a collection of stories. 1913 Nesbit publishes Wet Magic, a fantastical undersea adventure and her last children’s fantasy novel. The book marks the end of her association with illustrator H. R. Millar. 1914 In April, Hubert Bland dies. World War I begins. 1917 Nesbit marries Thomas Tucker, a retired tugboat operator affectionately known as “the Skipper.” 1920 A. A. Milne’s Mr. Pym Passes By is published, as is the first of Hugh Lofting’s Dr. Doolittle books. 1921 Nesbit and Tucker leave Well Hall and settle in Jesson St. Mary’s near Dymchurch. 1922 Nesbit publishes her last novel, The Lark, a romance based on the financial problems of her later years. 1924 Nesbit dies of cancer on May 4 in St. Mary’s. 1925 Five of Us—and Madeline is published. Rosamund Bland Sharp, Nesbit’s adopted daughter, compiles this collection of stories, using material provided by Nesbit’s second husband as well as excerpts from Nesbit’s memoirs originally published in The Girl’s Own Paper (1896-1897). 1966 Nesbit’s memoirs from The Girl’s Own Paper are published in book form under the title Long Ago When I was Young.
INTRODUCTION
In “The Book of Beasts,” the first story in her popular collection The Book of Dragons (1900), E. (for Edith) Nesbit tells the tale of a boy who unexpectedly inherits the throne of his country. Like his somewhat eccentric predecessor, the new king is soon drawn to the treasures of the royal library. Ignoring the advice of his counselors, the boy approaches a particularly handsome volume, The Book of Beasts, but as he gazes at the beautiful butterfly painted on the front page, the creature begins to flutter its wings and proceeds to fly out the library window. Unfortunately, the same thing occurs with the great dragon who appears on a subsequent page, and soon the beast starts to wreak havoc (though only on Saturdays) throughout the land. After the dragon carries off his rocking horse, the young king sets free a hippogriff from the The Book of Beasts, and together the boy and his white-winged companion lure the dragon to the Pebbly Waste, where the fiery creature, now deprived of the shade that keeps it from overheating, wriggles back into the book from which it came. The rocking horse is recovered but asks to live in the hippogriff’s page of the book, while the hippogriff, for its efforts, assumes the position of King’s Own Rocking Horse.
The release of fantastic creatures into the real world, at once serious and playful, exemplifies the most distinctive feature of Nesbit’s fantasies: the ceaseless interplay between the imaginary and the actual, the fluctuation between the magical world that her children enter through their books, games, and adventures, and the limiting conditions of everyday life. Unlike most of her predecessors, who situate the action of their books entirely in an imaginary realm or swiftly transport their protagonists into it, Nesbit’s fantasies are perpetually shuffling back and forth between the marvelous and the real, and much of their fascination lies in the interaction and confusion between them. In Five Children and It (1902), her first fantasy novel, the children’s exercise of imagination comes simply from the opportunity to have their wishes granted, and the results, however amusing to us, are sufficiently troublesome or embarrassing to make them welcome (at least temporarily) the return to the ordinary. In The Enchanted Castle (1907), the magic is more elusive and complex, and it leads to a serious meditation on the gift of imagination—its multi-form capacity to produce butterflies as well as dragons, and above all its power to redeem and transfigure, as the hippogriff does, the distress, insecurity, and inevitable sorrows of life in this world.
I
The life of Edith Nesbit (1858-1924) spanned the period that is now regarded as the golden age of children’s literature in the English-speaking world. The major precondition for this development lies in the emergence of modern industrial society, which produced not only an increasingly literate middle-class population but also a sharp division between home and workplace that effectively created the concept and condition of “childhood” as we now know it. Books for children have a long history, but there is little precedent for the boom in children’s fiction that began in the mid-nineteenth century. This new literature appeared in a variety of forms, including, among others, the boys’ adventure tale, the family story (a specialty of women writers), and the fantasy novel, which was often cross-written for children and adults. The adventure story, which descends from Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) and its many imitators, was pioneered in the mid-nineteenth century by Captain Frederick Marryat (1792—1848), R. M. Ballantyne (1825-1894), and Mayne Reid (1818-1883), and somewhat later by the prolific G. A. Henty (1832-1902), “the boys’ own historian,” who wrote more than one hundred novels featuring young male heroes caught up in significant historical conflicts. (Nesbit parodies Henty in Five Children and It, chapters 6 and 7; see endnote 4.) Among the finest fruits of this genre are the classics by Robert Louis Stevenson (Treasure Island, 1883; Kidnapped, 1886) and Mark Twain (The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, 1876; Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, 1884). The family story, which also rose to prominence in this period, is associated primarily with women writers such as Charlotte Yonge (1823-1901), Juliana Horatia Ewing (1841-1885), Mary Louisa Molesworth (1839-1921), and, in America, Louisa May Alcott (1832-1888), whose Little Women (1868) is widely regarded as the first masterpiece of this tradition, which paved the way for later classics such as Nesbit’s The Story of the Treasure Seekers (1899) and its sequels. In retrospect, perhaps the most remarkable children’s genre to emerge in the mid-nineteenth century is the cross-generational fantasy novel. Inspired by the immensely popular fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm (translated 1823-1826) and Hans Christian Andersen (translated in 1846), the fantasy tradition was built on the firm foundation established by three Victorian authors—George MacDonald (1824-1905), Charles Kingsley (1819-1875), and Lewis Carroll (1832-1898)—who produced a series of masterpieces over the course of little more than a decade. These include MacDonald’s Phantastes (1858), At the Back of the North Wind (1871), and The Princess and the Goblin (1872); Kingsley’s singular classic The Water-Babies (1863); and Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking-Glass (1871). In the first decade of the twentieth century, this tradition produced an especially rich harvest, often in the form of animal fantasies that Rudyard Kipling (1865—1936) popularized in his Jungle Books (1894, 1895); Beatrix Potter’s Peter Rabbit series (begun in 1900); Frank Baum’s The Wizard of Oz (1900) and its sequels; Kipling’s own Just So Stories (1902) and Puck of Pook’s Hill (1906); J. M. Barrie’s “Peter Pan” (first staged in 1904); Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows (1908); and Walter de la Mare’s The Three Mulla-Mulgars (1910). It is no coincidence that in this same brief and remarkable period, which came to an end around World War I, E. Nesbit also produced nearly all of the children’s fantasy novels for which she is now remembered.
II
As a writer of children’s fiction, Nesbit often drew upon her own early life and her experience as the mother of five children. It is no accident that the absence of one or both parents looms large in her fiction: Her father, a well-known agronomist who ran a small agricultural college in London, died when she was three. For the next few years, his widow managed the college on her own, but when Edith’s older sister was diagnosed with tuberculosis, the family began moving from place to place in an ultimately futile effort to find a hospitable climate. Edith herself was dispatched to one unpleasant boarding school after another, but as she recalls in her later memoir, these nomadic years also provided her with a rich quarry of adventures to which she repeatedly returned in her juvenile fiction. (The memoir, “My School-Days,” originally a series of vignettes in a children’s periodical, was later reprinted under the title Long Ago When I Was Young; see “For Further Reading.”)
In 1877 Edith met the dashing, intelligent, and politically active Hubert Bland, and two months after their marriage in 1880 she gave birth to the first of their children. Despite his many gifts, Bland was an uncertain breadwinner, and for many years Edith divided her time between caring for the children and writing (sometimes in collaboration with her husband) to support the family. In 1884 the Blands became founding members of the Fabian Society, the socialist think tank that under the guidance of Sidney Webb, its most outstanding theoretician, and his wife, Beatrice, would play a major role in the formation of progressive social policy over the coming decades. Hubert was not an intellectual on the order of Sidney Webb, but he became a respected newspaper columnist and remained a prominent member of the organization for many years. Edith’s position was less well defined, but as an active participant in the society she became acquainted with many prominent artists and intellectuals of the era, including George Bernard Shaw (with whom she had a brief affair in 1886); the exiled Russian philosopher Prince Peter Kropotkin; Annie Besant, the socialist firebrand who went on to lead the influential Theosophical Society; the renowned sexologist Edward Carpenter; and, some years later, H. G. Wells (whose ill-fated adulterous affair with the Blands’ daughter complicated his already strained relations with the Fabian leadership and led to his departure from the society). The agenda of the Fabian Society surfaces occasionally in Edith’s fiction, especially when she turns her attention to the extreme inequalities of Edwardian society, which were strikingly evident in the dismal conditions of the vast London slums. Nevertheless, scholars have raised questions about the degree and depth of her political commitments. During the height of her fame, she surprised her contemporaries by opposing the drive for women’s suffrage (which succeeded by 1918), and the typically good-hearted middle-class children of her most famous novels often amuse themselves by deceiving their bewildered servants.
Similar inconsistencies appear in Nesbit’s marriage and in other aspects of her personal life. On the one hand, she was known for her independent spirit. She adopted the trappings of the turn-of-the-century emancipated woman, cutting her hair short, wearing loose-fitting “aesthetic” clothing, and assuming what was then the exclusively male prerogative of smoking cigarettes. She also responded to her husband’s incessant womanizing by conducting affairs of her own, including the fling with George Bernard Shaw that she later turned into a romantic novel, Daphne in Fitzroy Street (1909). Many men courted the lively, athletic, and by all accounts highly attractive woman, and in later years she would hold court in her large rented home, Well Hall, surrounded by younger male admirers with whom she occasionally became involved. (Noel Coward, whom she met in her old age, called her “the most genuine Bohemian I ever met.”)1
On the other hand, the volatile and often hot-tempered Edith remained a devoted wife to her philandering husband. She raised two of his children by another woman—her friend Alice Hoatson—as if they were her own, and even allowed Alice to live with the family as a housekeeper. She also acquiesced to Hubert’s less palatable political views, including his opposition to women’s suffrage, and despite the occasional flare-ups that led Shaw to declare that “no two people were ever married who were better calculated to make the worst of each other,” she remained closely tied and dependent upon Hubert until his death in 1914.2 Three years later she surprised her family and friends by marrying a placid former tugboat operator, known as “the Skipper,” and settled into a happy if increasingly penurious old age until her own death in 1924.
Nesbit began publishing poetry in her teens, and for many years her primary aspiration was to develop into a great poet. From the time of her marriage until the end of the century she composed a multitude of verse, essays, short stories, adult novels, and stories for children, often working at top speed to keep the family afloat. Although she acquired a modest reputation as a poet and novelist, very few of these works have survived the test of time. After twenty years of prolific publication, she finally achieved acclaim with the release of her first children’s novel, The Story of the Treasure Seekers: Being the Adventures of the Bastable Children in Search of a Fortune (1899), a family adventure tale based on stories she had written for various magazines. The book sold well, and she capitalized on its success with a sequel, The Wouldbegoods: Being the Further Adventures of the Treasure Seekers (1901) and The New Treasure Seekers (1904). At the same time, she wrote her first fantasy novel, Five Children and It (1902), and employed the same set of children in two sequels, The Phoenix and the Carpet (1904) and The Story of the Amulet (1906). By this time her reputation was well established, but more successes would follow. In 1906 she published one of her most enduring family stories, The Railway Children, and the following year The Enchanted Castle, which many regard as her most mature work of fiction. Inspired by the success of H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine (1895), she then produced two time-travel romances, The House of Arden (1908) and its sequel, Harding’s Luck (1909), which have since lost some of their popular appeal, though a number of readers regard them as her best. A few other notable works appeared in subsequent years—The Magic City (1910), The Wonderful Garden (1911), The Magic World (1912), and Wet Magic (1913)—but in her last decade she wrote comparatively little for children and nothing to match the level of achievement in her decade-long run from The Story of the Treasure Seekers to Harding’s Luck.
III
The Story of the Treasure Seekers established the prototype for both the “realistic” family adventures and the “magical” fantasies that Nesbit composed over the next few years. At the outset of these novels, we are introduced to a middle-class family, often in distressed circumstances. Since the parents are either absent or preoccupied, the children are nominally in the care of servants, but usually left to their own devices, they embark on a series of exploits, sometimes designed to rectify the situation at home, at other times simply for the sake of adventure or sheer diversion. In The Treasure Seekers, we meet the six Bastable children (four boys and two girls), whose mother is dead and whose father is struggling with business problems. According to the eldest boy, Oswald, the novel’s delightfully bookish and vainglorious narrator, the children seek to restore “the fortunes of the ancient House of Bastable,” and they launch their quest by digging for buried treasure in their own garden. The scheme collapses when the roof of their underground tunnel caves in on the hapless Albert-next-door, but thanks to Albert’s amiable uncle—the first of several sympathetic adults—the children end up “discovering” a few small coins in their pile of dirt. In successive episodes, the Bastables continue their fortune-hunting by becoming freelance detectives, selling poetry to an amused literary editor, publishing a newspaper (one copy sold), and “kidnapping” Albert-next-door to extract a ransom from his uncle. The consequences of their later exploits are more serious. Finding a newspaper ad for private loans, the children visit the office of their “Generous Benefactor,” but complications arise when it turns out that the lender is already their father’s creditor. Further embarrassments result from their attempt to secure another benefactor by setting their dog on a rich local aristocrat and pretending to come to his rescue, and from their efforts to market their own wine and Bastable’s Certain Cure for Colds. The loose episode structure that emerges from these relatively self-contained adventures is characteristic of Nesbit’s early novels, though the interaction between juvenile imagination and adult reality often grows more complex in the later episodes. In one of the final vignettes of The Treasure Seekers, the children are imagining the life of a robber when suddenly they see a stranger whom they suspect is the real thing. The stranger, who is actually a friend of their father, pretends that he has been caught in the act, but when another unknown figure appears upon the scene and turns out be a real burglar, the imaginary “robber” borrows the children’s toy gun to scare him off. The novel concludes with another reversal of expectations, when the children discover that their seemingly poor and unremarkable Indian Uncle is actually the rich benefactor for whom they’ve been searching all along. Typical of Nesbit, just as they relinquish their wishes and fantasies in favor of a more realistic point of view, the children discover that the real world may be as enchanted as the world of their dreams. Or as the artfully artless Oswald puts it at the end, “I can’t help it if it is like Dickens, because it happens this way. Real life is often something like books.”
Nesbit went on to write further adventures of the Bastables, including The Wouldbegoods, her greatest financial success, and The New Treasure Seekers. She created a new set of protagonists for her next family adventure novel, The Railway Children (1906), but the design of the story remains much the same. Once again we find a middle-class family in straitened circumstances: Recalling the famous Dreyfus affair (still unresolved at the time Nesbit was writing), the father has been sent to prison, wrongly accused of spying for a foreign power, while the mother transports the family to a country house and tries to make ends meet with her writing. The children, initially unaware of the reason for their father’s absence, are drawn to the local railway line and embark on a series of adventures that lead to unexpected consequences, ranging from embarrassment over their misguided attempt to raise charity for a poor working-class family to commendation for their heroic efforts in helping to avert a railway disaster. Their adventures also place them in contact with a distinguished passenger, an unnamed “old gentleman” whose intervention, akin to that of the Indian Uncle in The Treasure Seekers, leads to the exoneration of their father and his return to the family. Although some readers found the novel excessively sentimental and lamented the loss of the Bastable clan, The Railway Children has remained a perennial favorite, especially in Britain, where it has been dramatized repeatedly on film and television.
IV
After completing her first two Bastable novels, Nesbit began a new serial publication, The Psammead (later changed to Five Children and It), which ran in The Strand Magazine from April to December 1902 with illustrations by her long-term collaborator, H. R. Millar (see endnote 11 to The Enchanted Castle). For this venture she created a new set of siblings—Cyril, Anthea, Robert, Jane, and their infant brother “The Lamb”—based loosely on her own five children. (“The Lamb,” to whom the book is dedicated, is John Bland, born in 1899, the second child of the affair between Hubert and Alice Hoatson; Edith raised him as her own, though her other four children were already in their teens.) The new fictional family (we never learn their surname) is less hard-pressed than the Bastables, but as soon as they arrive at their remote country house, the parents are called away to attend to other matters, and the children, left in the care of servants, begin to explore the surrounding area on their own. Nesbit’s distinctive mixture of realism and fantasy is apparent from the start. To the children, who have been bottled up in London for two years, the somewhat shabby house seems “a sort of Fairy Palace set down in an Earthly Paradise” (p. 10), and the chimney smoke from the local limekilns makes the valley beneath them glimmer “till they were like an enchanted city out of the Arabian Nights” (p. 12). In her casual conversation style, the narrator also gets in on the act. After informing her ostensibly juvenile audience that she will skip over the mundane events—to which adults might respond “How like life!” (p. 12)—she cleverly leads her readers (children and adults alike) into the realm of the marvelous by suggesting that when we think about it, the accepted facts of modern science, such as the roundness of the earth and its rotation around the sun, are no less astonishing than the events she’s about to relate, and they require a similar leap beyond the everyday world we can see and feel. Once we accept this demonstration of the marvelous character of the factual, we’re ready for the narrator’s almost matter-of-fact introduction of the marvelous: “Yet I daresay you believe all that about the earth and the sun, and if so you will find it quite easy to believe that before Anthea and Cyril and the others had been a week in the country they had found a fairy. At least they called it that, because that was what it called itself; and of course it knew best, but it was not at all like any fairy you ever saw or heard of or read about” (p. 13).
The narrator’s playful blending of the magical and the real sets the stage for what’s to come. As the children begin digging toward Australia in the local gravel-pit, they hear a sound that resolves itself into the words “You let me alone” (p. 16), and out of the sand emerges one of Nesbit’s most celebrated inventions—the Psammead, or “Sand-fairy,” derived from the Greek psammos (sand) and the names naiad (water nymph) and dryad (wood nymph) of Greek mythology. Like the name itself, this imaginary being, in contrast to the twittering tinkerbells of Victorian fairylands, is a lumpy composite assembled out of the body parts of more familiar creatures: “Its eyes were on long horns like a snail’s eyes, and it could move them in and out like telescopes; it had ears like a bat’s ears, and its tubby body was shaped like a spider’s and covered with thick soft fur; its legs and arms were furry too, and it had hands and feet like a monkey’s” (p. 17). (See Millar’s illustrations on pp. 6, 58, 76, 111, and 147.) The Psammead’s character reveals a similar amalgamation of the real and the marvelous: Grumpy, mercurial, and ever concerned with the hair on its upper left whisker that was once exposed to water, the Psammead is also obliged to fulfill human wishes, though his normal limit is one wish per day, and his magic terminates at sunset. The Psammead’s recollection of the prehistoric past, when the shell-filled gravel-pit was still by the seaside and the children of our remotest ancestors asked him for practical things like dinosaur dinners, also combines the ordinary and the magical, awakening the imagination to the presence of a distant past whose traces may still be present in the very ground we stand on.
Nesbit’s fantasy novels often hark back to traditional fairy tales, and behind Five Children and It lies the well-known tale of “the three wishes,” which appears in many versions around the world. Once the children realize that the Psammead will grant their wishes, they consider the implications of one of the variants of the traditional tale—the “black pudding story” (p. 20), in which a man who dislikes his wife’s cooking wishes for a helping of black pudding, to which she reacts by wishing the pudding on his nose; he then must use the third and final wish to undo the effects of the second. (Coincidentally, a darker and instantly famous version of the tale, W. W. Jacobs’s “The Monkey’s Paw,” appeared in 1902.) While expressing our desire to transcend the limits of ordinary existence, the fairy tale of “the three wishes” warns us to beware of our own wishes, dreams, and fantasies by revealing the consequences of their literal fulfillment. As Bruno Bettelheim points out, however, the self-canceling circularity of these tales is also reassuring and enhances our willingness to accept the reality of things as they are.3 In Nesbit’s case, the children witness the adverse effects of their wishes and welcome the return to normality at the end of each day, but their recurrent desire to return to the magical, compounded by the sheer excitement of some of their madcap adventures, suggests that the pleasures of the imagination are enticing enough to offset the risks and dangers that its exercise entails.
The children squander their first few wishes on conventional vanities. No sooner does the Psammead fulfill their initial request—to be “as beautiful as the day” (p. 21)—than they long for a return to their flawed natural selves, especially after the Lamb, who fails to recognize them, starts to cry inconsolably, and the nursemaid Martha, assuming they are strangers, denies them entry into the house. The setting sun rescues the children from their plight, but despite some precautionary deliberations on the following day, their next wish—“to be rich beyond the dreams of something or other” (p. 33)—is as formulaic as their first. It also yields similarly disappointing results when they discover that the ancient coins with which the Psammead has filled the gravel-pit are refused by the local villagers, who are suspicious enough to summon the police. Nesbit spices up the episode with the children’s supplementary wish that the servants won’t notice the Psammead’s magic, which leads to mayhem when Martha appears on the scene and is unable to see the allegedly incriminating coins with which the children have filled their pockets. Once again, the dusk brings a return to normal, and when the children wake up the next morning, their squabbles over the logic of wish-fulfillment indicates that they’ve grown somewhat wary of the Psammead and more discriminating in their wishes.
At the opposite end from these stock desires are the impulsive wishes that proceed from anger or insecurity. Annoyed that the Lamb has knocked over his ginger-beer, Robert expresses his anger by wishing that others would want the child so that “we might get some peace in our lives” (p. 56). Unfortunately, one of the rules of the Psammead’s magic is that wishes cannot be annulled, and as a result, from then until sunset the Lamb must be rescued from the affectionate clutches of one stranger after another, including the haughty Lady Chittenden, who otherwise has no love for children. In a similar episode later on, Cyril blurts out that he wishes the Lamb would grow up, and consequently the children must spend an entire day with an insufferable prig who disavows his pet name as “a relic of foolish and far-off childhood” (p. 152) and insists that his brothers and sisters address him by one of his baptismal names, Hilary, St. Maur, or Devereux. (See Millar’s illustration on p. 159, which depicts Martha holding the grown-up Lamb in her arms as if her were an infant, which within her spatial frame of reference he still is.) Also based on hotheaded desire is the episode in which the children accost the rather imposing “baker’s boy” (p. 128), who is in no mood to play the victim in a game of bandits, and in the aftermath of the ensuing skirmish, Robert seeks to avenge his defeat by wishing he was bigger than his rival. His wish is immediately granted, but the now gargantuan Robert must exercise some restraint in giving the baker’s boy his comeuppance; and then, compelled to wait until sundown for the restoration of his normal proportions, he ends up as a sideshow spectacle at the local fair. Each of these incidents portrays the consequences of impetuous desire, but in their common concern with the vulnerability of children, they explore the conflict between the desire to secure the power that presumably comes with adult size and stature, and the grown-up recognition that we bear some responsibility for those who are even less secure than ourselves.
A third class of wishes is associated directly with art and the power of imagination. After the initial wishes for beauty and wealth go awry, the kind and thoughtful Anthea consults the Psammead, and while its only advice is “think before you speak” (p. 77), her wish for wings (that time-honored symbol of creative imagination) results not only in the literal gift of flight but in an experience more “wonderful and more like real magic than any wish the children had had yet” (p. 80). To be sure, when the day is done they are asleep in the turret of a church tower and must be rescued by the local vicar, but in the end the joy of their magical journey seems to outweigh the humiliations of their descent into ordinary reality and the punishment meted out by the angry Martha upon their arrival home. Moreover, as a result of this escapade Martha also meets the gamekeeper of the vicarage; therefore, as the narrator intimates, the magic of this episode may have some enduring effects, though at this point in the novel “that is another story” (p. 100), and we must wait for the final chapter to learn the outcome.
In two later episodes of a similar kind, the books the children read inspire their flights of imagination. In the first instance, the charm of popular “historical romances for the young” (p. 105) produces the transformation of their house into a castle under siege (though the servants, who remain blind to the magic, continue to go about their business as usual). Nesbit seems to enjoy poking at the stilted language of the besiegers, as well as the historical mishmash of their equipment, with shields from the Middle Ages, swords from the Napoleonic era, and tents “of the latest brand” (p. 105). But despite Robert’s effort to persuade them that they’re merely fictive beings, these storybook soldiers pose a real threat to the “castle,” at least as long as daylight lasts, and once the sunset puts an end to the encounter, the children not only breathe a sigh of relief but also find themselves exhilarated by the episode. While engaging in a parody that showcases the absurdity of these historical romances, Nesbit also pays homage to their power to delight and to stimulate the imagination of the juvenile reader.
The last of these literary episodes materializes from a reading of The Last of the Mohicans, and it generates considerable suspense as the children wait apprehensively for the Indians—“ ‘not big ones, you know, but little ones, just about the right size for us to fight’ ” (p. 161)—to exhibit their legendary stealth and suddenly emerge out of nowhere. Once the savages appear and the children realize that their scalps are really on the line, they make a desperate run for the gravel-pit, but before they can find the Psammead, they are surrounded by their miniature assailants and prepare themselves for the scalping-knife and the flames. Fortunately, the Indians can’t find any firewood to burn their enemies, and the peril comes to an end when their chief bewails this “strange unnatural country” and wishes that “we were but in our native forest once more” (p. 171). Like the story of the besieged castle, the comic undercurrent of this episode, which turns on the disparity between the fictive and the real, is offset by the emphasis upon the capacity of imagination to enchant the world that ordinary mortals inhabit. But while the parodic element of the castle episode puts limits on the sense of real danger, Nesbit’s transposition of Indian warriors to modern Britain goes further in producing some of the same thrilling emotions that keep us riveted to a well-wrought romance of high adventure.
The heightened intensity of the Indian affair paves the way for the final drama, in which the children eagerly await the return of their parents. But the distinctive magic inherent in the reunion between parents and children is complicated by a final impulsive wish to grace their mother’s return with a special gift. When the children hear that Lady Chittenden’s valuable jewelry has been stolen, Jane casually wishes that her mother might own such wonderful things. As readers we might well sympathize with the transfer of riches from the child-hating ogress to the loving mother, but the wish turns their mother into a receiver of stolen goods, and the suspicion that wrongly falls on the vicarage gamekeeper threatens to foil Martha’s plans for marriage. In desperation the children strike a final deal with the Psammead, who undoes the effects of their folly in exchange for a reprieve from “silly” gift-giving and a promise not to reveal his identity to adults, who might ask for “earnest things” such as “a graduated income-tax, and old-age-pensions and manhood suffrage, and free secondary education, and dull things like that; and get them, and keep them, and the whole world would be turned topsy-turvy” (p. 182). As in the fairy tale of “the three wishes,” the Psammead’s circular and self-negating magic may help to reconcile us to things as they are, and its final disappearance into the sand represents a return from the enticing world of wishes to the more secure if less enthralling routines of everyday life. But there is more to this story than a lesson on “the vanity of human wishes.” At the conclusion of the novel, the return of absent parents, along with the prospective union of Martha and her fiance, possesses a certain magic of its own. Moreover, Nesbit conveys the sense that as double-edged and dangerous as many of our wishes may be, they also express an enduring impulse to transcend the limited and sometimes painful and unjust conditions of life as it is. And perhaps most of all, the Psammead’s magic invites us to engage in flights of imagination that restrictively “realistic” fiction often fails to provide. In this respect, Nesbit carefully balances the moral of “the three wishes” with the seemingly ineradicable desires that give rise not only to traditional fairy tales but also to her own distinctive union of the magical and the mundane.
Nesbit retained the same juvenile ensemble in her two subsequent fantasies, The Phoenix and the Carpet and The Story of the Amulet. In the first, the scene shifts to London, and the Psammead is replaced by another wishing creature, the Phoenix, the legendary bird known for its beauty and its singular capacity for rebirth from its own ashes. Out of commission for two millennia, Nesbit’s high-toned patrician bird returns to life in the family parlor and takes the children on a loosely organized series of romps through London and beyond, all the while exhibiting its somewhat haughty but engagingly comic dignity—proud, poetic, and disdainful of the prosaic character of modern life. The Psammead reappears in The Story of the Amulet, but it plays a relatively minor role in the quest for the missing half of a magic charm that has the capacity to confer “our hearts’ desire” (p. 281). The clue to the missing half-amulet is buried in the past. The search takes the children on a series of voyages in time, first to a prehistoric village along the Nile (c.6000 B.C.) and then to ancient Babylon at the height of its glory. After that, they voyage to the seafaring civilization of ancient Tyre, the glorious mythical continent of Atlantis just before it sinks into the sea, ancient Britain at the time of Caesar’s conquest (55 B.C.), again to ancient Egypt (this time during the reign of the Pharoah), and finally forward in time, first to a utopian London free of the ills of the Edwardian city, and then to the near future, where they encounter their own adult selves. Nesbit has nearly as much fun with overlapping times as she did with overlapping spaces in Five Children and It, when, for instance, the Queen of Babylon is transported from her own time to the children’s London and is not only appalled by the shabbiness of the modern metropolis but also insists on the return of her jewels from the British Museum. (C. S. Lewis, who admired the novel, recreates this episode in The Magician’s Nephew [1955], where the much more treacherous Queen Jadis escapes from her own world and stirs up trouble in Edwardian London.)4 Despite such touches of humor, each of these time-travel adventures invites reflection on the nature of society and the state, and taken together they reflect the increasingly serious mood of Nesbit’s later fantasies. So does the joining together of the two halves of the amulet, which produces a vision of a higher domain that transcends the injurious divisions and contradictions of everyday life and allows us to pass “through the perfect charm to the perfect union, which is not of time or space.” Nesbit would never abandon the kind of “funny” magic that prevails in Five Children and It, but the resolution of The Story of the Amulet points to the more “serious” magic that would come to the fore in her next major fantasy, The Enchanted Castle.
V
Nesbit’s most ambitious work of fiction starts off as most of her previous novels. Once again, we meet a group of middle-class siblings who set forth on a series of adventures. In this instance, we begin with a threesome—Gerald, Kathleen, and Jimmy—who are compelled to remain at school for the holidays in the charge of a young schoolmistress, the good-natured “Mademoiselle.” Like the Bastables and the “five children,” these siblings are reasonably well differentiated and inclined to incessant squabbling. Gerald, the oldest and most resourceful, bears a certain resemblance to Oswald Bastable. Unlike the latter, he is not the narrator of the novel, but he possesses the habit of narrating his own actions in a self-conscious literary manner (annoying to the other children, if amusing to us) that inevitably grants him pride of place: “ ‘The young explorers, ... dazzled at first by the darkness of the cave, could see nothing.... But their dauntless leader, whose eyes had grown used to the dark while the clumsy forms of the others were bunging up the entrance, had made a discovery’ ” (p. 198). Jimmy, by contrast, is the resident skeptic who not only punctures the pretensions of others but also plays an important role as the doubting Thomas of this mischievously magical universe. Kathleen, the middle child, is less well marked, but as with Anthea and some of Nesbit’s other young girls, her common sense and compassion offset some of the eccentricities of her male companions and provide some ballast to the group. Like the “five children” before them, Nesbit’s new team wanders into a magical world, but we soon discover that in this novel it is often difficult to distinguish the enchanted and the real, and questions of truth and belief play a more prominent role than in the earlier novels. Over time we also discover that the plot of this novel, which seems to begin as another loosely organized sequence of episodes, is more unified and considerably more complex than its predecessors. Nesbit offers no explicit structural signposts, but if nothing else, the twelve untitled chapters seem to fall into two discrete sets of six, and as we shall see, the symmetries established by the apparent subdivision of each half of the book into three two-chapter sets indicates that she took considerable pains to construct a carefully integrated work of art.
In the opening section of the novel (chapters 1 and 2), the children are resting by the roadside when the chance discovery of a hidden passage transports them into a magical world, or so it seems from the extraordinary garden that opens before them, with its abundant statuary and huge stone edifice looming in the distance behind it. Nesbit draws on classical myth (the Minotaur’s labyrinth) and fairy tale (Sleeping Beauty) to enhance the magical atmosphere: The children enter a maze of hedges and notice a thread that takes them to the center, where they find the reposing form of “the enchanted Princess” (p. 208). Jimmy is doubtful—“she’s only a little girl dressed up” (p. 208)—but once he wakens her with a kiss, his irrepressible skepticism is sorely tested by her commanding manner—“you’re a very unbelieving little boy” (p. 218)—her impressive living quarters, and her display of magic in the treasure chamber, where she makes her jewelry appear and disappear at will. But things begin to change when the girl dons a ring that presumably “makes you invisible” (p. 220). After she asks the children to close their eyes and count, Jimmy debunks her so-called magic (inadvertently we’re told) by seeing her lift a secret panel. As it turns out, however, the “Princess” is less distressed by the exposure of her pranks than by the fact that the ring has actually made her invisible. In the true confession that follows, we learn that she is the very ordinary Mabel Prowse, niece of Lord Yalding’s housekeeper, and the seemingly enchanted realm into which we and the children have wandered is actually his estate. But if as readers we have shared in the deception and must acknowledge that Jimmy’s suspicions have been correct all along, we also join the children in finding ourselves face to face with the new conundrum posed by Mabel’s invisibility and the magical ring that confers it. Such oscillations and confusions between imagination and reality are harbingers of things to come.
In the following chapters, reminiscent of the “funny” magic in earlier novels, we follow the children on a set of escapades that proceed from their attempt to exploit the power of invisibility: profiting from a conjuring act at the local fair; assuming the role of detectives, which leads to the sighting of a real burglary; and sowing confusion among the unsuspecting servants. We also learn that wearing the ring produces not only invisibility but also a seemingly random assemblage of other effects, including the indifference of friends and relatives, the suppression of fear, and above all, the capacity to apprehend a higher if still enigmatic dimension of enchantment. In chapter 4, we catch a glimpse of this new dimension when the ring-bearing Gerald enters the Yalding gardens at night and, sensing that he is “in another world” (p. 257), beholds the statues of classical gods and giant dinosaurs awaken into life. The vision is ephemeral and in the short run inconsequential, but it offers the first hint of something that transcends the prosaic magic of earlier episodes; it anticipates the more sustained and momentous vision of the statuary that appears in the fourth chapter of the second half of the novel.
After the fleeting epiphany in the garden, the novel reverts to the type of adventure that preceded it, but things begin to change in chapter 6 with the theatrical pageant—a re-enactment of Beauty and the Beast—that brings the first half of the book to an end. The genial Mademoiselle (who seems mysteriously moved by the news that the impoverished Lord Yalding is about to visit his estate) is present to watch the play, but the children enlarge their audience by creating a set of grotesque figures out of sticks, broom handles, pillows, and paper masks. At the end of the pageant’s second act, the Beast (Gerald) hands the magical ring to Beauty (Mabel) and announces that it has the power to “give you anything you wish” (p. 301). Unfortunately, when Mabel wishes that the inanimate members of the audience were alive to enhance the applause, the figures suddenly come to life and soon march out the door. On a first reading of the novel, it is difficult to fathom the far-reaching implications of this scene, whose most immediate effect is to launch the pursuit of these animated inanimates (now called the Ugly-Wuglies) in the following chapters. We see that the ring is more mysterious than it seemed, but at this point the apparent transformation into a wishing ring remains an enigma. So does the import of Beauty and the Beast, which at once prefigures the stirring real-life pageant of the final chapter and, as the fairy-tale version of the story of Cupid and Psyche, offers a first taste of the myth that informs the ultimate vision of the novel (see endnote 10).
The encounter with the Ugly-Wuglies (chapters 7 and 8) hovers on the border between comedy and terror. Nesbit never abandons her sense of humor, but in this section of the novel she elicits an element of fear, confusion, and violence that marks a departure from anything we’ve seen before. At first the Ugly-Wuglies are polite to a fault in their search for “a good hotel” (p. 305), and as creatures of pure surface—clothes without bodies, voices without brains—they seem to represent a world of empty ritual and innocuous cliché. Social satire plays a significant role in this episode, especially after one of the Ugly-Wuglies mutates into a rich London stockbroker. But this aspect of the Uglies is outweighed by the terror they strike in the hearts of the children, who must summon the courage required to face them. The sudden animation of the inanimate is frightening enough, but once they are corralled into a dark chamber behind the Temple of Flora—the goddess of fertility—these initially docile creatures grow angry and turn into raging furies (who later escape and assault the adult “bailiff” who has helped to confine them). Since the children are aware that these creatures are their own invention, the significance of Flora and her subterranean chamber may lie in the association between fertility and the creative imagination, which is the source of both horrors and delights, the root of vain, violent, and monstrous pursuits as well as the fount of empathy and the enduring ideal of social and cosmic harmony. In this respect, Jimmy’s wish (instantly fulfilled) to be as rich as the Ugly-Wugly stockbroker may be regarded as a misuse of imagination, and it suggests that a society which channels its energies into a single-minded obsession with perpetual accumulation becomes at once vapid and vicious, as empty, distorted, and ultimately devoid of imagination as the Ugly-Wuglies themselves.
After this descent into the abyss of distorted imagination, Nesbit quickly prepares us for the visionary ascent of the subsequent section (chapters 9 and 10): “There is a curtain, thin as gossamer, clear as glass, strong as iron, that hangs for ever between the world of magic and the world that seems to us to be real. And when once people have found one of the little weak spots in that curtain which are marked by magic rings, and amulets, and the like, almost anything may happen” (p. 345). In contrast to the playful magic of Mabel’s wish to be twelve feet tall, the higher magic begins with a symbolic rebirth (inside the belly of a stone dinosaur) when the kind and sensitive Kathleen is transformed into one of the living statues we first encountered in the middle section of the first half (chapters 3 and 4). Surprisingly free of all fear, she is welcomed by the animate statue of the god Apollo and invited to witness “the beautiful enchantment” (p. 361) of the garden as it comes alive at night. Soon the other children are allowed to join in the “celestial picnic” (p. 370) with the marble Olympians, and Apollo’s lyre captivates them with “all the beautiful dreams of all the world ... and all the lovely thoughts that sometimes hover near, but not so near that you can catch them.... and it seemed that the whole world lay like a magic apple in the hand of each listener, and that the whole world was good and beautiful” (pp. 374-375). After the visionary moment fades with the dawn, the children must make their somewhat melancholy journey back to the everyday world. But prior to the end of this section they enter a magnificent hall (later identified as the Hall of Granted Wishes) that is surrounded by arches through which they can discern a multitude of images ranging from “a good hotel” for the Ugly-Wugly—“there are some souls that ask no higher thing of life”—to pictures that reveal “some moment when life had sprung to fire and flower—the best that the soul of man could ask or man’s destiny grant” (p. 380). Finally, at the end of the hall the children find the statue of the winged Psyche, symbolically the source of all wishes and imaginings, wearing the magical ring. With ceremonial deference to the goddess, they remove the ring from her hand, and the sensible Kathleen, who is not only aware of the deeper truth that “ ‘the ring’s what you say it is’ ” (p. 347) but also knows when enough is enough for mere mortals, makes the wish that “we were safe in our own beds, undressed, and in our nightgowns, and asleep” (p. 381).
After they return from the visionary world, the children participate in the enchantment of the real world that takes place in the final section of the novel (chapters 11 and 12). We learn that the “bailiff” who assisted with the confinement of the Ugly-Wuglies is actually Lord Yalding himself, and that Mademoiselle is the woman he loves despite the opposition of his relatives, who have deprived him of control over the estate. One by one the obstacles to their marriage are overcome, and at the Temple of Flora we witness a ceremony—reminiscent of the production of Beauty and the Beast that concluded the first half of the novel—in which Lord Yalding places the ring on the finger of his ever more radiant bride:The children have drawn back till they stand close to the lovers. The moonbeam slants more and more; now it touches the far end of the stone, now it draws nearer and nearer to the middle of it, now at last it touches the very heart and centre of that central stone. And then it is as though a spring were touched, a fountain of light released. Everything changes. Or, rather, everything is revealed. There are no more secrets. The plan of the world seems plain, like an easy sum that one writes in big figures on a child’s slate. One wonders how one can ever have wondered about anything. Space is not; every place that one has seen or dreamed of is here. Time is not; into this instant is crowded all that one has ever done or dreamed of doing. It is a moment and it is eternity. It is the centre of the universe and it is the universe itself. The eternal light rests on and illuminates the eternal heart of things (p. 409).
As the ceremony continues, all of the statues come alive—ancient creatures both real and imaginary, followed by a vast array of gods and goddesses—and the lovers proceed to the Hall of Granted Wishes (a.k.a. the Hall of Psyche), where the history of the ring is revealed and Mademoiselle makes a final wish “that all the magic this ring has wrought may be undone, and that the ring itself may be no more and no less than a charm to bind thee and me together for evermore” (p. 411). In the ensuing transformation, which echoes Prospero’s renunciation of magic at the end of The Tempest, the mystical light dies away, the windows of granted wishes disappear, and the statue of Psyche turns into a mere grave. At the same time, in the spirit of Keats and the Romantics, the very process of demythologizing the myth of Cupid and Psyche reveals its full significance, as the imaginary god and his lover are replaced by a real man and woman who are bound together in a climactic vision of the soul uplifted and transfigured by the power of love. Nesbit concludes the novel on a humorous note, but the return to the more impish manner of her “funny” magic dramatically underscores the turn to the more “serious” magic that gathers force over the second half of the novel. Many readers prefer the vitality of the former to the gravity of the latter, and many of those who admire her later works favor the social critique of The Story of the Amulet, The House of Arden, and Harding’s Luck over the Romantic Platonism of The Enchanted Castle. But never again would Nesbit undertake such an ambitious work of children’s fiction, and none of her other books possesses either the coherence or the complexity of her architectonic masterpiece.
VI
It is easy to underestimate Nesbit’s influence on modern children’s fiction, especially in North America, where she has never enjoyed the same level of popularity as she has in the British Isles. Historians continue to debate the degree of her originality, but they seem to agree that however much she was indebted to her Victorian predecessors, Nesbit brought a new and more modern voice to children’s fiction, and in certain respect, her distinctive fusion of magic and realism, which cast a spell on later generations of children’s authors, endures to this day. According to Colin Manlove, “After Nesbit, children’s fantasy was never quite the same again. She showed just how much fun could be made of bringing magic into the ordinary domestic lives of children: And she introduced to children’s fantasy the idea of the group of different children, rather than the frequently solitary child of earlier books. Her books demonstrated that fantasy could be wildly inventive and yet follow its own peculiar laws.”5 All of these Nesbit trademarks—the family ensemble, the mixture of the magic and the realism, the rites of passage between worlds—are prominent features of C. S. Lewis’s classic cycle The Chronicles of Narnia (1950-1956). With good reason Lewis’s admirers emphasize the influence of George MacDonald and members of his own literary circle, J. R. R. Tolkien and Charles Williams. But as several Lewis scholars have pointed out, the Narnia series is in some ways far more closely related to Nesbit’s fiction, which informs the narrative voice, the basic elements of character and plot, and a surprising number of specific details, particularly in The Magician’s Nephew, which is set in Nesbit’s turn-of-the-century London and draws liberally on her works.6 On the other side of the Atlantic, Lewis’s American contemporary, Edward Eager, author of the popular “Half Magic” series (1954-1958), openly identifies Nesbit as the source of his inspiration. At the outset of the first volume, Half Magic, a family of four book-loving children forbids oral recitation after suffering through Evangeline, but “this summer the rule had changed. This summer the children had found some books by a writer named E. Nesbit, surely the most wonderful books in the world.... And now yesterday The Enchanted Castle had come in, and they took it out, and Jane, because she could read fastest and loudest, read it out loud all the way home, and when they got home she went on reading, and when their mother came home they hardly said a word to her, and when dinner was served they didn’t notice a thing they ate.”7 It is arguable that Nesbit’s influence has ebbed since the days of these mid-century testimonials, and that children’s fantasy itself has shifted terrain in the last few decades. But Nesbit’s imprint is still apparent in some of the genre’s most popular practitioners, including Philip Pullman and J. K. Rowling, and even in cinematic productions such as Pixar’s Toy Story (1995), a direct descendant of The Magic City (1910). Admittedly, a century after their appearance her novels seem embedded in a bygone society and reflect some of its now outmoded values. Moreover, as a writer who seems to have one foot planted in Victorian society and the other in the twentieth century, Nesbit has sparked debate over the extent to which she departs from the heavy-handed didacticism of her literary predecessors, and it is often difficult to decide whether she is subverting or affirming the norms of her notably class-conscious and patriarchal society. But what seems to have endured beyond the cultural trappings of her transitional era is the freshness of her narrative voice, the vivacity and playful humor that in the right circumstances might modulate into high seriousness, and, perhaps above all, the perpetual fusion and confusion between the imaginary and the real, the books we read and the lives we live, the magical lure of our wishes, dreams, and desires, and the inevitably limited conditions of existence that they ceaselessly enchant.
Sanford Schwartz teaches English literature at Pennsylvania State University (University Park). He is the author of The Matrix of Modernism and various essays on modern literary, cultural, and intellectual history. He is currently writing a book on C. S. Lewis’s science fiction trilogy.
Acknowledgments: I wish to thank several friends and colleagues who provided encouragement and indispensable support along the way: Julia Briggs, for clarifying some baffling allusions in these century-old novels; Elizabeth Jenkins, for assistance with the dialects, slang, and semantic subtleties of what I once considered my native tongue; John Poritsky, for direction on recent work in children’s literature; and my incomparable research assistant, Jeff Pruchnic, for just about everything.
Notes
1 Quoted in Dorothy Langley Moore, E. Nesbit: A Biography (1933; revised edition, London: Benn, 1967), p. 197.
2 From Shaw’s interview with Dorothy Langley Moore, quoted in Julia Briggs, A Woman of Passion: The Life of E. Nesbit, 1858-1924 (London: Hutchinson, 1987), p. xvi.
3 Bruno Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1976), pp. 71-72.
4 In his autobiography, Surprised by Joy (1955), Lewis recalls his childhood reading of Nesbit’s novels: “Much better than either of these [Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sir Nigel and Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court] was E. Nesbit’s trilogy, Five Children and It, The Phoenix and the Wishing Carpet [sic], and The Amulet. The last did most for me. It first opened my eyes to antiquity, the ‘dark backward and abysm of time.’ I can still reread it with delight.” C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life (San Diego: Harcourt, 1970), p. 14.
5 Colin Manlove, From Alice to Harry Potter: Children’s Fantasy in England (Christchurch, New Zealand: Cybereditions, 2003), p. 47.
6 Mervyn Nicholson, “What C. S. Lewis Took from E. Nesbit,” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly 16 (1991), pp. 16-22.
7 Edward Eager, Half Magic (1954; San Diego: Harcourt, 1999), pp. 4-5 .
FIVE CHILDREN AND ITTo JOHN BLAND1My Lamb, you are so very small, You have not learned to read at all. Yet never a printed book withstands The urgence of your dimpled hands. So, though this book is for yourself, Let mother keep it on the shelf Till you can read. O days that pass, That day will come too soon, alas!
The Psammead
CHAPTER I
BEAUTIFUL AS THE DAY
The house was three miles from the station, but before the dusty hired flya had rattled along for five minutes the children began to put their heads out of the carriage window and to say, “Aren’t we nearly there?” And every time they passed a house, which was not very often, they all said, “Oh, is this it?” But it never was, till they reached the very top of the hill, just past the chalk-quarry and before you come to the gravel-pit. And then there was a white house with a green garden and an orchard beyond, and mother said, “Here we are!”
“How white the house is,” said Robert.
“And look at the roses,” said Anthea.
“And the plums,” said Jane.
“It is rather decent,” Cyril admitted.
The Baby said, “Wanty go walky”; and the fly stopped with a last rattle and jolt.
Everyone got its legs kicked or its feet trodden on in the scramble to get out of the carriage that very minute, but no one seemed to mind. Mother, curiously enough, was in no hurry to get out; and even when she had come down slowly and by the step, and with no jump at all, she seemed to wish to see the boxes carried in, and even to pay the driver, instead of joining in that first glorious rush round the garden and the orchard and the thorny, thistly, briery, brambly wilderness beyond the broken gate and the dry fountain at the side of the house. But the children were wiser, for once. It was not really a pretty house at all; it was quite ordinary, and mother thought it was rather inconvenient, and was quite annoyed at there being no shelves, to speak of, and hardly a cupboard in the place. Father used to say that the ironwork on the roof and coping was like an architect’s nightmare. But the house was deep in the country, with no other house in sight, and the children had been in London for two years, without so much as once going to the seaside even for a day by an excursion train, and so the White House seemed to them a sort of Fairy Palace set down in an Earthly Paradise. For London is like prison for children, especially if their relations are not rich.
That first glorious rush round the garden
Of course there are the shops and the theatres, and Maskelyne and Cook’s,b and things, but if your people are rather poor you don’t get taken to the theatres, and you can’t buy things out of the shops; and London has none of those nice things that children may play with without hurting the things or themselves—such as trees and sand and woods and waters. And nearly everything in London is the wrong sort of shape—all straight lines and flat streets, instead of being all sorts of odd shapes, like things are in the country. Trees are all different, as you know, and I am sure some tiresome person must have told you that there are no two blades of grass exactly alike. But in streets, where the blades of grass don’t grow, everything is like everything else. This is why so many children who live in towns are so extremely naughty. They do not know what is the matter with them, and no more do their fathers and mothers, aunts, uncles, cousins, tutors, governesses, and nurses; but I know. And so do you now. Children in the country are naughty sometimes, too, but that is for quite different reasons.
The children had explored the gardens and the outhouses thoroughly before they were caught and cleaned for tea, and they saw quite well that they were certain to be happy at the White House. They thought so from the first moment, but when they found the back of the house covered with jasmine, all in white flower, and smelling like a bottle of the most expensive scent that is ever given for a birthday present; and when they had seen the lawn, all green and smooth, and quite different from the brown grass in the gardens at Camden Town; and when they had found the stable with a loft over it and some old hay still left, they were almost certain; and when Robert had found the broken swing and tumbled out of it and got a lump on his head the size of an egg, and Cyril had nipped his finger in the door of a hutch that seemed made to keep rabbits in, if you ever had any, they had no longer any doubts whatever.
The best part of it all was that there were no rules about not going to places and not doing things. In London almost everything is labelled “You mustn’t touch,” and though the label is invisible, it’s just as bad, because you know it’s there, or if you don’t you jolly soon get told.
The White House was on the edge of a hill, with a wood behind it—and the chalk-quarry on one side and the gravel-pit on the other. Down at the bottom of the hill was a level plain, with queer-shaped white buildings where people burnt lime, and a big red brewery and other houses; and when the big chimneys were smoking and the sun was setting, the valley looked as if it was filled with golden mist, and the limekilns and oasthousesc glimmered and glittered till they were like an enchanted city out of the Arabian Nights.
Cyril had nipped his finger in the door of a hutch
Now that I have begun to tell you about the place, I feel that I could go on and make this into a most interesting story about all the ordinary things that the children did—just the kind of things you do yourself, you know—and you would believe every word of it; and when I told about the children’s being tiresome, as you are sometimes, your aunts would perhaps write in the margin of the story with a pencil, “How true!” or “How like life!” and you would see it and very likely be annoyed. So I will only tell you the really astonishing things that happened, and you may leave the book about quite safely, for no aunts and uncles either are likely to write “How true!” on the edge of the story. Grown-up people find it very difficult to believe really wonderful things, unless they have what they call proof But children will believe almost anything, and grown-ups know this. That is why they tell you that the earth is round like an orange, when you can see perfectly well that it is flat and lumpy; and why they say that the earth goes round the sun, when you can see for yourself any day that the sun gets up in the morning and goes to bed at night like a good sun as it is, and the earth knows its place, and lies as still as a mouse. Yet I daresay you believe all that about the earth and the sun, and if so you will find it quite easy to believe that before Anthea and Cyril and the others had been a week in the country they had found a fairy. At least they called it that, because that was what it called itself; and of course it knew best, but it was not at all like any fairy you ever saw or heard of or read about.
It was at the gravel-pits. Father had to go away suddenly on business, and mother had gone away to stay with Granny, who was not very well. They both went in a great hurry, and when they were gone the house seemed dreadfully quiet and empty, and the children wandered from one room to another and looked at the bits of paper and string on the floors left over from the packing, and not yet cleared up, and wished they had something to do. It was Cyril who said:
“I say, let’s take our Margate spades and go and dig in the gravel-pits. We can pretend it’s seaside.”
“Father said it was once,” Anthea said; “he says there are shells there thousands of years old.”
So they went. Of course they had been to the edge of the gravel-pit and looked over, but they had not gone down into it for fear father should say they mustn’t play there, and the same with the chalk-quarry. The gravel-pit is not really dangerous if you don’t try to climb down the edges, but go the slow safe way round by the road, as if you were a cart.
Each of the children carried its own spade, and took it in turns to carry the Lamb. He was the baby, and they called him that because “Baa” was the first thing he ever said. They called Anthea “Panther,” which seems silly when you read it, but when you say it it sounds a little like her name.
The gravel-pit is very large and wide, with grass growing round the edges at the top, and dry stringy wildflowers, purple and yellow. It is like a giant’s wash-hand basin. And there are mounds of gravel, and holes in the sides of the basin where gravel has been taken out, and high up in the steep sides there are the little holes that are the little front doors of the little sand-martins’d little houses.
The children built a castle, of course, but castle-building is rather poor fun when you have no hope of the swishing tide ever coming in to fill up the moat and wash away the drawbridge, and, at the happy last, to wet everybody up to the waist at least.
Cyril wanted to dig out a cave to play smugglers in, but the others thought it might bury them alive, so it ended in all spades going to work to dig a hole through the castle to Australia. These children, you see, believed that the world was round, and that on the other side the little Australian boys and girls were really walking wrong way up, like flies on the ceiling, with their heads hanging down into the air.
The children dug and they dug and they dug, and their hands got sandy and hot and red, and their faces got damp and shiny. The Lamb had tried to eat the sand, and had cried so hard when he found that it was not, as he had supposed, brown sugar, that he was now tired out, and was lying asleep in a warm fat bunch in the middle of the half-finished castle. This left his brothers and sisters free to work really hard, and the hole that was to come out in Australia soon grew so deep that Jane, who was called “Pussy” for short, begged the others to stop.
“Suppose the bottom of the hole gave way suddenly,” she said, “and you tumbled out among the little Australians, all the sand would get in their eyes.”
“Yes,” said Robert; “and they would hate us, and throw stones at us, and not let us see the kangaroos, or opossums, or blue-gums,e or Emu Brand birds,f or anything.”
Cyril and Anthea knew that Australia was not quite so near as all that, but they agreed to stop using the spades and go on with their hands. This was quite easy, because the sand at the bottom of the hole was very soft and fine and dry, like sea-sand. And there were little shells in it.
“Fancy it having been wet sea here once, all sloppy and shiny,” said Jane, “with fishes and conger-eels and coral and mermaids.”
“And masts of ships and wrecked Spanish treasure. I wish we could find a gold doubloon,g or something,” Cyril said.
“How did the sea get carried away?” Robert asked.
“Not in a pail, silly,” said his brother. “Father says the earth got too hot underneath, like you do in bed sometimes, so it just hunched up its shoulders, and the sea had to slip off, like the blankets do off us, and the shoulder was left sticking out, and turned into dry land. Let’s go and look for shells; I think that little cave looks likely, and I see something sticking out there like a bit of wrecked ship’s anchor, and it’s beastly hot in the Australian hole.”
The others agreed, but Anthea went on digging. She always liked to finish a thing when she had once begun it. She felt it would be a disgrace to leave that hole without getting through to Australia.
The cave was disappointing, because there were no shells, and the wrecked ship’s anchor turned out to be only the broken end of a pickaxe handle, and the cave party were just making up their minds that the sand makes you thirstier when it is not by the seaside, and someone had suggested going home for lemonade, when Anthea suddenly screamed:
“Cyril! Come here! Oh, come quick! It’s alive! It’ll get away! Quick!”
They all hurried back.
“It’s a rat, I shouldn’t wonder,” said Robert. “Father says they infest old places—and this must be pretty old if the sea was here thousands of years ago.”
“Perhaps it is a snake,” said Jane, shuddering.
“Let’s look,” said Cyril, jumping into the hole. “I’m not afraid of snakes. I like them. If it is a snake I’ll tame it, and it will follow me everywhere, and I’ll let it sleep round my neck at night.”
Anthea suddenly screamed: “It’s alive!”
“No, you won’t,” said Robert firmly. He shared Cyril’s bedroom. “But you may if it’s a rat.”
“Oh, don’t be silly!” said Anthea; “it’s not a rat, it’s much bigger. And it’s not a snake. It’s got feet; I saw them; and fur! No—not the spade. You’ll hurt it! Dig with your hands.”
“And let it hurt me instead! That’s so likely, isn’t it?” said Cyril, seizing a spade.
“Oh, don’t!” said Anthea. “Squirrel, don’t. I—it sounds silly, but it said something. It really and truly did.”
“What?”
“It said, ‘You let me alone.’ ”
But Cyril merely observed that his sister must have gone off her nut, and he and Robert dug with spades while Anthea sat on the edge of the hole, jumping up and down with hotness and anxiety. They dug carefully, and presently everyone could see that there really was something moving in the bottom of the Australian hole.
Then Anthea cried out, “I’m not afraid. Let me dig,” and fell on her knees and began to scratch like a dog does when he has suddenly remembered where it was that he buried his bone.
“Oh, I felt fur,” she cried, half laughing and half crying. “I did indeed! I did!” when suddenly a dry husky voice in the sand made them all jump back, and their hearts jumped nearly as fast as they did.
“Let me alone,” it said. And now everyone heard the voice and looked at the others to see if they had too.
“But we want to see you,” said Robert bravely.
“I wish you’d come out,” said Anthea, also taking courage.
“Oh, well—if that’s your wish,” the voice said, and the sand stirred and spun and scattered, and something brown and furry and fat came rolling out into the hole and the sand fell off it, and it sat there yawning and rubbing the ends of its eyes with its hands.
“I believe I must have dropped asleep,” it said, stretching itself.
The children stood round the hole in a ring, looking at the creature they had found. It was worth looking at. Its eyes were on long horns like a snail’s eyes, and it could move them in and out like telescopes; it had ears like a bat’s ears, and its tubby body was shaped like a spider’s and covered with thick soft fur; its legs and arms were furry too, and it had hands and feet like a monkey’s.
“What on earth is it?” Jane said. “Shall we take it home?”
The thing turned its long eyes to look at her, and said: “Does she always talk nonsense, or is it only the rubbish on her head that makes her silly?”
It looked scornfully at Jane’s hat as it spoke.
“She doesn’t mean to be silly,” Anthea said gently; “we none of us do, whatever you may think! Don’t be frightened; we don’t want to hurt you, you know.”
“Hurt me!” it said. “Me frightened? Upon my word! Why, you talk as if I were nobody in particular.” All its fur stood out like a cat’s when it is going to fight.
“Well,” said Anthea, still kindly, “perhaps if we knew who you are in particular we could think of something to say that wouldn’t make you cross. Everything we’ve said so far seems to have. Who are you? And don’t get angry! Because really we don’t know.”
“You don’t know?” it said. “Well, I knew the world had changed— but—well, really—do you mean to tell me seriously you don’t know a Psammeadh when you see one?”
“A Sammyadd? That’s Greek to me.”
“So it is to everyone,” said the creature sharply. “Well, in plain English, then, a Sand-fairy. Don’t you know a Sand-fairy when you see one?”
It looked so grieved and hurt that Jane hastened to say, “Of course I see you are, now. It’s quite plain now one comes to look at you.”
“You came to look at me, several sentences ago,” it said crossly, beginning to curl up again in the sand.
“Oh—don’t go away again! Do talk some more,” Robert cried. “I didn’t know you were a Sand-fairy, but I knew directly I saw you that you were much the wonderfullest thing I’d ever seen.”
The Sand-fairy seemed a shade less disagreeable after this.
“It isn’t talking I mind,” it said, “as long as you’re reasonably civil. But I’m not going to make polite conversation for you. If you talk nicely to me, perhaps I’ll answer you, and perhaps I won’t. Now say something.”
Of course no one could think of anything to say, but at last Robert thought of “How long have you lived here?” and he said it at once.
“Oh, ages—several thousand years,” replied the Psammead.
“Tell us all about it. Do.”
“It’s all in books.”
“You aren’t!” Jane said. “Oh, tell us everything you can about yourself! We don’t know anything about you, and you are so nice.”
The Sand-fairy smoothed his long rat-like whiskers and smiled between them.
“Do please tell!” said the children all together.
It is wonderful how quickly you get used to things, even the most astonishing. Five minutes before, the children had had no more idea than you that there was such a thing as a sand-fairy in the world, and now they were talking to it as though they had known it all their lives.
It drew its eyes in and said:
“How very sunny it is—quite like old times. Where do you get your Megatheriums from now?”
“What?” said the children all at once. It is very difficult always to remember that “what” is not polite, especially in moments of surprise or agitation.
“Are Pterodactyls plentiful now?” the Sand-fairy went on.
The children were unable to reply.
“What do you have for breakfast?” the Fairy said impatiently, “and who gives it you?”
“Eggs and bacon, and bread-and-milk, and porridge and things. Mother gives it us. What are Mega-what’s-its-names and Ptero-what-do-you-call-thems? And does anyone have them for breakfast?”
“Why, almost everyone had Pterodactyl for breakfast in my time! Pterodactyls were something like crocodiles and something like birds—I believe they were very good grilled. You see it was like this: of course there were heaps of sand-fairies then, and in the morning early you went out and hunted for them, and when you’d found one it gave you your wish. People used to send their little boys down to the seashore early in the morning before breakfast to get the day’s wishes, and very often the eldest boy in the family would be told to wish for a Megatherium,i ready jointed for cooking. It was as big as an elephant, you see, so there was a good deal of meat on it. And if they wanted fish, the Ichthyosaurus was asked for—he was twenty to forty feet long, so there was plenty of him. And for poultry there was the Plesiosaurus; there were nice pickings on that too. Then the other children could wish for other things. But when people had dinner-parties it was nearly always Megatheriums; and Ichthyosaurus, because his fins were a great delicacy and his tail made soup.”
“There must have been heaps and heaps of cold meat left over,” said Anthea, who meant to be a good housekeeper some day.
“Oh no,” said the Psammead, “that would never have done. Why, of course at sunset what was left over turned into stone. You find the stone bones of the Megatherium and things all over the place even now, they tell me.”
“Who tell you?” asked Cyril; but the Sand-fairy frowned and began to dig very fast with its furry hands.
“Oh, don’t go!” they all cried; “tell us more about it when it was Megatheriums for breakfast! Was the world like this then?”
It stopped digging.
“Not a bit,” it said; “it was nearly all sand where I lived, and coal grew on trees, and the periwinkles were as big as tea-trays—you find them now; they’re turned into stone. We sand-fairies used to live on the seashore, and the children used to come with their little flint-spades and flint-pails and make castles for us to live in. That’s thousands of years ago, but I hear that children still build castles on the sand. It’s difficult to break yourself of a habit.”
“But why did you stop living in the castles?” asked Robert.
“It’s a sad story,” said the Psammead gloomily. “It was because they would build moats to the castles, and the nasty wet bubbling sea used to come in, and of course as soon as a sand-fairy got wet it caught cold, and generally died. And so there got to be fewer and fewer, and, whenever you found a fairy and had a wish, you used to wish for a Megatherium, and eat twice as much as you wanted, because it might be weeks before you got another wish.”
“And did you get wet?” Robert inquired.
The Sand-fairy shuddered. “Only once,” it said; “the end of the twelfth hair of my top left whisker—I feel the place still in damp weather. It was only once, but it was quite enough for me. I went away as soon as the sun had dried my poor dear whisker. I scurried away to the back of the beach, and dug myself a house deep in warm dry sand, and there I’ve been ever since. And the sea changed its lodgings afterwards. And now I’m not going to tell you another thing.”
“Just one more, please,” said the children. “Can you give wishes now?”
“Of course,” said it; “didn’t I give you yours a few minutes ago? You said, ‘I wish you’d come out,’ and I did.”
“Oh, please, mayn’t we have another?”
“Yes, but be quick about it. I’m tired of you.”
I daresay you have often thought what you would do if you had three wishes given you, and have despised the old man and his wife in the black-pudding story,2 and felt certain that if you had the chance you could think of three really useful wishes without a moment’s hesitation. These children had often talked this matter over, but, now the chance had suddenly come to them, they could not make up their minds.
“Quick,” said the Sand-fairy crossly. No one could think of anything, only Anthea did manage to remember a private wish of her own and Jane’s which they had never told the boys. She knew the boys would not care about it—but still it was better than nothing.
“I wish we were all as beautiful as the day,” she said in a great hurry.
The children looked at each other, but each could see that the others were not any better-looking than usual. The Psammead pushed out its long eyes, and seemed to be holding its breath and swelling itself out till it was twice as fat and furry as before. Suddenly it let its breath go in a long sigh.
“I’m really afraid I can’t manage it,” it said apologetically; “I must be out of practice.”
The children were horribly disappointed.
“Oh, do try again!” they said.
“Well,” said the Sand-fairy, “the fact is, I was keeping back a little strength to give the rest of you your wishes with. If you’ll be contented with one wish a day amongst the lot of you I daresay I can screw myself up to it. Do you agree to that?”
“Yes, oh yes!” said Jane and Anthea. The boys nodded. They did not believe the Sand-fairy could do it. You can always make girls believe things much easier than you can boys.
It stretched out its eyes farther than ever, and swelled and swelled and swelled.
“I do hope it won’t hurt itself,” said Anthea.
“Or crack its skin,” Robert said anxiously.
Everyone was very much relieved when the Sand-fairy, after getting so big that it almost filled up the hole in the sand, suddenly let out its breath and went back to its proper size.
“That’s all right,” it said, panting heavily. “It’ll come easier tomorrow.”
“Did it hurt much?” asked Anthea.
“Only my poor whisker, thank you,” said he, “but you’re a kind and thoughtful child. Good day.”
It scratched suddenly and fiercely with its hands and feet, and disappeared in the sand. Then the children looked at each other, and each child suddenly found itself alone with three perfect strangers, all radiantly beautiful.
They stood for some moments in perfect silence. Each thought that its brothers and sisters had wandered off, and that these strange children had stolen up unnoticed while it was watching the swelling form of the Sand-fairy. Anthea spoke first—
“Excuse me,” she said very politely to Jane, who now had enormous blue eyes and a cloud of russet hair, “but have you seen two little boys and a little girl anywhere about?”
“I was just going to ask you that,” said Jane. And then Cyril cried:
“Why, it’s you! I know the hole in your pinafore.j You are Jane, aren’t you? And you’re the Panther; I can see your dirty handkerchief that you forgot to change after you’d cut your thumb! Crikey! The wish has come off, after all, I say, am I as handsome as you are?”
“If you’re Cyril, I liked you much better as you were before,” said Anthea decidedly. “You look like the picture of the young chorister, with your golden hair; you’ll die young, I shouldn’t wonder. And if that’s Robert, he’s like an Italian organ-grinder. His hair’s all black.”
“You two girls are like Christmas cards, then—that’s all—silly Christmas cards,” said Robert angrily. “And Jane’s hair is simply carrots.”
It was indeed of that Venetian tint so much admired by artists.
“Well, it’s no use finding fault with each other,” said Anthea; “let’s get the Lamb and lug it home to dinner. The servants will admire us most awfully, you’ll see.”
Baby was just waking when they got to him, and not one of the children but was relieved to find that he at least was not as beautiful as the day, but just the same as usual.
“I suppose he’s too young to have wishes naturally,” said Jane. “We shall have to mention him specially next time.”
Anthea ran forward and held out her arms.
“Come to own Panther, ducky,” she said.
The Baby looked at her disapprovingly, and put a sandy pink thumb in his mouth. Anthea was his favourite sister.
“Come then,” she said.
“G’way long!” said the Baby.
“Come to own Pussy,” said Jane.
“Wants my Panty,” said the Lamb dismally, and his lip trembled.
“Here, come on, Veteran,” said Robert, “come and have a yidey on Yobby’s back.”
“Yah, narky narky boy,” howled the Baby, giving way altogether. Then the children knew the worst. The Baby did not know them!
They looked at each other in despair, and it was terrible to each, in this dire emergency, to meet only the beautiful eyes of perfect strangers, instead of the merry, friendly, commonplace, twinkling, jolly little eyes of its own brothers and sisters.
“This is most truly awful,” said Cyril when he had tried to lift up the Lamb, and the Lamb had scratched like a cat and bellowed like a bull. “We’ve got to make friends with him! I can’t carry him home screaming like that. Fancy having to make friends with our own Baby!—it’s too silly.”
That, however, was exactly what they had to do. It took over an hour, and the task was not rendered any easier by the fact that the Lamb was by this time as hungry as a lion and as thirsty as a desert.
At last he consented to allow these strangers to carry him home by turns, but as he refused to hold on to such new acquaintances he was a dead weight and most exhausting.
“Thank goodness, we’re home!” said Jane, staggering through the iron gate to where Martha, the nursemaid, stood at the front door shading her eyes with her hand and looking out anxiously. “Here! Do take Baby!”
Martha snatched the Baby from her arms.
“Thanks be, he’s safe back,” she said. “Where are the others, and whoever to goodness gracious are all of you?”
“We’re us, of course,” said Robert.
“And who’s us, when you’re at home?” asked Martha scornfully.
“I tell you it’s us, only we’re beautiful as the day,” said Cyril. “I’m Cyril, and these are the others, and we’re jolly hungry. Let us in, and don’t be a silly idiot.”
Martha merely dratted Cyril’s impudence and tried to shut the door in his face.
The baby did not know them!
“I know we look different, but I’m Anthea, and we’re so tired, and it’s long past dinner-time.”
“Then go home to your dinners, whoever you are; and if our children put you up to this play-acting you can tell them from me they’ll catch it, so they know what to expect!” With that she did bang the door. Cyril rang the bell violently. No answer. Presently cook put her head out of a bedroom window and said:
“If you don’t take yourselves off, and that precious sharp, I’ll go and fetch the police.” And she slammed down the window.
“It’s no good,” said Anthea. “Oh, do, do come away before we get sent to prison!”
The boys said it was nonsense, and the law of England couldn’t put you in prison for just being as beautiful as the day, but all the same they followed the others out into the lane.
“We shall be our proper selves after sunset, I suppose,” said Jane.
“I don’t know,” Cyril said sadly; “it mayn’t be like that now—things have changed a good deal since Megatherium times.”
“Oh,” cried Anthea suddenly, “perhaps we shall turn into stone at sunset, like the Megatheriums did, so that there mayn’t be any of us left over for the next day.”
She began to cry, so did Jane. Even the boys turned pale. No one had the heart to say anything.
It was a horrible afternoon. There was no house near where the children could beg a crust of bread or even a glass of water. They were afraid to go to the village, because they had seen Martha go down there with a basket, and there was a local constable. True, they were all as beautiful as the day, but that is a poor comfort when you are as hungry as a hunter and as thirsty as a sponge.
Three times they tried in vain to get the servants in the White House to let them in and listen to their tale. And then Robert went alone, hoping to be able to climb in at one of the back windows and so open the door to the others. But all the windows were out of reach, and Martha emptied a toilet-jug of cold water over him from a top window, and said:
“Go along with you, you nasty little Eyetalian monkey.”
It came at last to their sitting down in a row under the hedge, with their feet in a dry ditch, waiting for sunset, and wondering whether, when the sun did set, they would turn into stone, or only into their own old natural selves; and each of them still felt lonely and among strangers, and tried not to look at the others, for, though their voices were their own, their faces were so radiantly beautiful as to be quite irritating to look at.
“I don’t believe we shall turn to stone,” said Robert, breaking a long miserable silence, “because the Sand-fairy said he’d give us another wish to-morrow, and he couldn’t if we were stone, could he?”
The others said “No,” but they weren’t at all comforted.
Another silence, longer and more miserable, was broken by Cyril’s suddenly saying, “I don’t want to frighten you girls, but I believe it’s beginning with me already. My foot’s quite dead. I’m turning to stone, I know I am, and so will you in a minute.”
“Never mind,” said Robert kindly, “perhaps you’ll be the only stone one, and the rest of us will be all right, and we’ll cherish your statue and hang garlands on it.”
Martha emptied a toilet-jug of cold water over him
But when it turned out that Cyril’s foot had only gone to sleep through his sitting too long with it under him, and when it came to life in an agony of pins and needles, the others were quite cross.
“Giving us such a fright for nothing!” said Anthea.
The third and miserablest silence of all was broken by Jane. She said: “If we do come out of this all right, we’ll ask the Sammyadd to make it so that the servants don’t notice anything different, no matter what wishes we have.”
The others only grunted. They were too wretched even to make good resolutions.
At last hunger and fright and crossness and tiredness—four very nasty things—all joined together to bring one nice thing, and that was sleep. The children lay asleep in a row, with their beautiful eyes shut and their beautiful mouths open. Anthea woke first. The sun had set, and the twilight was coming on.
Anthea pinched herself very hard, to make sure, and when she found she could still feel pinching she decided that she was not stone, and then she pinched the others. They, also, were soft.
“Wake up,” she said, almost in tears of joy; “it’s all right, we’re not stone. And oh, Cyril, how nice and ugly you do look, with your old freckles and your brown hair and your little eyes. And so do you all!” she added, so that they might not feel jealous.
When they got home they were very much scolded by Martha, who told them about the strange children.
“A good-looking lot, I must say, but that impudent.”
“I know,” said Robert, who knew by experience how hopeless it would be to try to explain things to Martha.
“And where on earth have you been all this time, you naughty little things, you?”
“In the lane.”
“Why didn’t you come home hours ago?”
“We couldn’t because of them,” said Anthea.
“Who?”
“The children who were as beautiful as the day. They kept us there till after sunset. We couldn’t come back till they’d gone. You don’t know how we hated them! Oh, do, do give us some supper—we are so hungry.”
“Hungry! I should think so,” said Martha angrily; “out all day like this. Well, I hope it’ll be a lesson to you not to go picking up with strange children—down here after measles, as likely as not! Now mind, if you see them again, don’t you speak to them—not one word nor so much as a look—but come straight away and tell me. I’ll spoil their beauty for them!”
“If ever we do see them again we’ll tell you,” Anthea said; and Robert, fixing his eyes fondly on the cold beef that was being brought in on a tray by cook, added in heartfelt undertones—
“And we’ll take jolly good care we never do see them again.”
And they never have.
CHAPTER II
GOLDEN GUINEAS
Anthea woke in the morning from a very real sort of dream, in which she was walking in the Zoological Gardens on a pouring wet day without any umbrella. The animals seemed desperately unhappy because of the rain, and were all growling gloomily. When she awoke, both the growling and the rain went on just the same. The growling was the heavy regular breathing of her sister Jane, who had a slight cold and was still asleep. The rain fell in slow drops on to Anthea’s face from the wet corner of a bath-towel which her brother Robert was gently squeezing the water out of, to wake her up, as he now explained.
“Oh, drop it!” she said rather crossly; so he did, for he was not a brutal brother, though very ingenious in apple-pie beds,k booby-traps, original methods of awakening sleeping relatives, and the other little accomplishments which make home happy.
“I had such a funny dream,” Anthea began.
“So did I,” said Jane, wakening suddenly and without warning. “I dreamed we found a Sand-fairy in the gravel-pits, and it said it was a Sammyadd, and we might have a new wish every day, and—”
“But that’s what I dreamed,” said Robert. “I was just going to tell you—and we had the first wish directly it said so. And I dreamed you girls were donkeys enough to ask for us all to be beautiful as the day, and we jolly well were, and it was perfectly beastly.”
“But can different people all dream the same thing?” said Anthea, sitting up in bed, “because I dreamed all that as well as about the Zoo, and the rain; and Baby didn’t know us in my dream, and the servants shut us out of the house because the radiantness of our beauty was such a complete disguise, and—”
The rain fell in slow drops on to Anthea’s face
The voice of the eldest brother sounded from across the landing.
“Come on, Robert,” it said, “you’ll be late for breakfast again—unless you mean to shirk your bath like you did on Tuesday.”
“I say, come here a sec,” Robert replied. “I didn’t shirk it; I had it after brekkerl in father’s dressing-room, because ours was emptied away.”
Cyril appeared in the doorway, partially clothed.
“Look here,” said Anthea, “we’ve all had such an odd dream. We’ve all dreamed we found a Sand-fairy.”
Her voice died away before Cyril’s contemptuous glance. “Dream?” he said, “you little sillies, it’s true. I tell you it all happened. That’s why I’m so keen on being down early. We’ll go up there directly after brekker, and have another wish. Only we’ll make up our minds, solid, before we go, what it is we do want, and no one must ask for anything unless the others agree first. No more peerless beauties for this child, thank you. Not if I know it!”
The other three dressed, with their mouths open. If all that dream about the Sand-fairy was real, this real dressing seemed very like a dream, the girls thought. Jane felt that Cyril was right, but Anthea was not sure, till after they had seen Martha and heard her full and plain reminders about their naughty conduct the day before. Then Anthea was sure. “Because,” said she, “servants never dream anything but the things in the Dream-book, like snakes and oysters and going to a wedding—that means a funeral, and snakes are a false female friend, and oysters are babies.”
“Talking of babies,” said Cyril, “where’s the Lamb?”
“Martha’s going to take him to Rochesterm to see her cousins. Mother said she might. She’s dressing him now,” said Jane, “in his very best coat and hat. Bread-and-butter, please.”
“She seems to like taking him too,” said Robert in a tone of wonder.
“Servants do like taking babies to see their relations,” Cyril said. “I’ve noticed it before—especially in their best things.”
“I expect they pretend they’re their own babies, and that they’re not servants at all, but married to noble dukes of high degree, and they say the babies are the little dukes and duchesses,” Jane suggested dreamily, taking more marmalade. “I expect that’s what Martha’ll say to her cousin. She’ll enjoy herself most frightfully.”
“She won’t enjoy herself most frightfully carrying our infant duke to Rochester,” said Robert, “not if she’s anything like me—she won’t.”
“Fancy walking to Rochester with the Lamb on your back! Oh, crikey!” said Cyril in full agreement.
“She’s going by carrier,” said Jane. “Let’s see them off, then we shall have done a polite and kindly act, and we shall be quite sure we’ve got rid of them for the day.”
So they did.
Martha wore her Sunday dress of two shades of purple, so tight in the chest that it made her stoop, and her blue hat with the pink cornflowers and white ribbon. She had a yellow-lace collar with a green bow. And the Lamb had indeed his very best cream-coloured silk coat and hat. It was a smart party that the carrier’s cart picked up at the Cross Roads. When its white tiltn and red wheels had slowly vanished in a swirl of chalk-dust—
“And now for the Sammyadd!” said Cyril, and off they went.
As they went they decided on the wish they would ask for. Although they were all in a great hurry they did not try to climb down the sides of the gravel-pit, but went round by the safe lower road, as if they had been carts. They had made a ring of stones round the place where the Sand-fairy had disappeared, so they easily found the spot. The sun was burning and bright, and the sky was deep blue—without a cloud. The sand was very hot to touch.
“Oh—suppose it was only a dream, after all,” Robert said as the boys uncovered their spades from the sandheap where they had buried them and began to dig.
“Suppose you were a sensible chap,” said Cyril; “one’s quite as likely as the other!”
“Suppose you kept a civil tongue in your head,” Robert snapped.
“Suppose we girls take a turn,” said Jane, laughing. “You boys seem to be getting very warm.”
“Suppose you don’t come shoving your silly oar in,” said Robert, who was now warm indeed.
“We won’t,” said Anthea quickly. “Robert dear, don’t be so grumpy—we won’t say a word, you shall be the one to speak to the Fairy and tell him what we’ve decided to wish for. You’ll say it much better than we shall.”
“Suppose you drop being a little humbug,” said Robert, but not crossly. “Look out—dig with your hands, now!”
So they did, and presently uncovered the spider-shaped brown hairy body, long arms and legs, bat’s ears and snail’s eyes of the Sand-fairy himself. Everyone drew a deep breath of satisfaction, for now of course it couldn’t have been a dream.
The Psammead sat up and shook the sand out of its fur.
“How’s your left whisker this morning?” said Anthea politely.
“Nothing to boast of,” said it, “it had rather a restless night. But thank you for asking.”
“I say,” said Robert, “do you feel up to giving wishes today, becausewe very much want an extra besides the regular one? The extra’s a very little one,” he added reassuringly.
“Humph!” said the Sand-fairy. (If you read this story aloud, please pronounce “humph” exactly as it is spelt, for that is how he said it.) “Humph! Do you know, until I heard you being disagreeable to each other just over my head, and so loud too, I really quite thought I had dreamed you all. I do have very odd dreams sometimes.”
“Do you?” Jane hurried to say, so as to get away from the subject of disagreeableness. “I wish,” she added politely, “you’d tell us about your dreams—they must be awfully interesting.”
“Is that the day’s wish?” said the Sand-fairy, yawning.
Cyril muttered something about “just like a girl,” and the rest stood silent. If they said “Yes,” then good-bye to the other wishes they had decided to ask for. If they said “No,” it would be very rude, and they had all been taught manners, and had learned a little too, which is not at all the same thing. A sigh of relief broke from all lips when the Sand-fairy said:
“If I do I shan’t have strength to give you a second wish; not even good tempers, or common sense, or manners, or little things like that.”
“We don’t want you to put yourself out at all about these things, we can manage them quite well ourselves,” said Cyril eagerly; while the others looked guiltily at each other, and wished the Fairy would not keep all on about good tempers, but give them one good rowing if it wanted to, and then have done with it.
“Well,” said the Psammead, putting out his long snail’s eyes so suddenly that one of them nearly went into the round boy’s eyes of Robert, “let’s have the little wish first.”
“We don’t want the servants to notice the gifts you give us.”
“Are kind enough to give us,” said Anthea in a whisper.
“Are kind enough to give us, I mean,” said Robert.
The Fairy swelled himself out a bit, let his breath go, and said—
“I’ve done that for you—it was quite easy. People don’t notice things much, anyway. What’s the next wish?”
“We want,” said Robert slowly, “to be rich beyond the dreams of something or other.”
“Avarice,” said Jane.
“So it is,” said the Fairy unexpectedly. “But it won’t do you much good, that’s one comfort,” it muttered to itself. “Come—I can’t go beyond dreams, you know! How much do you want, and will you have it in gold or notes?”
“Gold, please—and millions of it.”
“This gravel-pit full be enough?” said the Fairy in an off-hand manner.
“Oh yes!”
“Then get out before I begin, or you’ll be buried alive in it.”
It made its skinny arms so long, and waved them so frighteningly, that the children ran as hard as they could towards the road by which carts used to come to the gravel-pits. Only Anthea had presence of mind enough to shout a timid “Good-morning, I hope your whisker will be better tomorrow,” as she ran.
On the road they turned and looked back, and they had to shut their eyes, and open them very slowly, a little bit at a time, because the sight was too dazzling for their eyes to be able to bear it. It was something like trying to look at the sun at high noon on Midsummer Day o For the whole of the sand-pit was full, right up to the very top, with new shining gold pieces, and all the little sand-martins’ little front doors were covered out of sight. Where the road for the carts wound into the gravel-pit the gold lay in heaps like stones lie by the roadside, and a great bank of shining gold shelved down from where it lay flat and smooth between the tall sides of the gravel-pit. And all the gleaming heap was minted gold. And on the sides and edges of these countless coins the midday sun shone and sparkled, and glowed and gleamed till the quarry looked like the mouth of a smelting furnace, or one of the fairy halls that you see sometimes in the sky at sunset.
The children stood with their mouths open, and no one said a word.
At last Robert stopped and picked up one of the loose coins from the edge of the heap by the cart-road, and looked at it. He looked on both sides. Then he said in a low voice, quite different to his own, “It’s not sovereigns.”p
All the gleaming heap was minted gold
“It’s gold, anyway,” said Cyril. And now they all began to talk at once. They all picked up the golden treasure by handfuls, and let it run through their fingers like water, and the chink it made as it fell was wonderful music. At first they quite forgot to think of spending the money, it was so nice to play with. Jane sat down between two heaps of gold and Robert began to bury her, as you bury your father in sand when you are at the seaside and he has gone to sleep on the beach with the newspaper over his face. But Jane was not half buried before she cried out, “Oh, stop, it’s too heavy! It hurts!”
Robert said “Bosh!” and went on.
“Let me out, I tell you,” cried Jane, and was taken out, very white, and trembling a little.
“You’ve no idea what it’s like,” said she; “it’s like stones on you—or like chains.”
“Look here,” Cyril said, “if this is to do us any good, it’s no good our staying gasping at it like this. Let’s fill our pockets and go and buy things. Don’t you forget, it won’t last after sunset. I wish we’d asked the Sammyadd why things don’t turn to stone. Perhaps this will. I’ll tell you what, there’s a pony and cart in the village.”
“Do you want to buy that?” asked Jane.
“No, silly—we’ll hire it. And then we’ll go to Rochester and buy heaps and heaps of things. Look here, let’s each take as much as we can carry. But it’s not sovereigns. They’ve got a man’s head on one side and a thing like the ace of spades on the other. Fill your pockets with it, I tell you, and come along.You can jaw as we go—if you must jaw.”
Cyril sat down and began to fill his pockets.
“You made fun of me for getting father to have nine pockets in my Norfolks,”q said he, “but now you see!”
They did. For when Cyril had filled his nine pockets and his handkerchief and the space between himself and his shirt front with the gold coins, he had to stand up. But he staggered, and had to sit down again in a hurry.
“Throw out some of the cargo,” said Robert. “You’ll sink the ship, old chap. That comes of nine pockets.”
And Cyril had to.
He staggered, and had to sit down again
Then they set off to walk to the village. It was more than a mile, and the road was very dusty indeed, and the sun seemed to get hotter and hotter, and the gold in their pockets got heavier and heavier.
It was Jane who said, “I don’t see how we’re to spend it all. There must be thousands of pounds among the lot of us. I’m going to leave some of mine behind this stump in the hedge. And directly we get to the village we’ll buy some biscuits; I know it’s long past dinner-time.” She took out a handful or two of gold and hid it in the hollows of an old hornbeam.r “How round and yellow they are,” she said. “Don’t you wish they were gingerbread nuts and we were going to eat them?”
“Well, they’re not, and we’re not,” said Cyril. “Come on!”
But they came on heavily and wearily. Before they reached the village, more than one stump in the hedge concealed its little hoard of hidden treasure. Yet they reached the village with about twelve hundred guineass in their pockets. But in spite of this inside wealth they looked quite ordinary outside, and no one would have thought they could have more than a half-crown each at the outside. The haze of heat, the blue of the wood smoke, made a sort of dim, misty cloud over the red roofs of the village. The four sat down heavily on the first bench they came to. It happened to be outside the Blue Boar Inn.
It was decided that Cyril should go into the Blue Boar and ask for ginger-beer, because, as Anthea said, “It is not wrong for men to go into public houses, only for children. And Cyril is nearer to being a man than us, because he is the eldest.” So he went. The others sat in the sun and waited.
“Oh, hats, how hot it is!” said Robert. “Dogs put their tongues out when they’re hot; I wonder if it would cool us at all to put out ours?”
“We might try,” Jane said; and they all put their tongues out as far as ever they could go, so that it quite stretched their throats, but it only seemed to make them thirstier than ever, besides annoying everyone who went by. So they took their tongues in again, just as Cyril came back with the ginger-beer.
“I had to pay for it out of my own two-and-seven-pence, though, that I was going to buy rabbits with,” he said. “They wouldn’t change the gold. And when I pulled out a handful the man just laughed and said it was card-counters.t And I got some sponge-cakes too, out of a glass jar on the bar-counter. And some biscuits with caraways in.”
The sponge-cakes were both soft and dry and the biscuits were dry too, and yet soft, which biscuits ought not to be. But the ginger-beer made up for everything.
“It’s my turn now to try to buy something with the money,” Anthea said; “I’m next eldest. Where is the pony-cart kept?”
It was at The Chequers, and Anthea went in the back way to the yard, because they all knew that little girls ought not to go into the bars of public-houses. She came out, as she herself said, “pleased but not proud.”
They all put their tongues out
“He’ll be ready in a brace of shakes,u he says,” she remarked, “and he’s to have one sovereign—or whatever it is—to drive us into Rochester and back, besides waiting there till we’ve got everything we want. I think I managed very well.”
“You think yourself jolly clever, I daresay,” said Cyril moodily. “How did you do it?”
“I wasn’t jolly clever enough to go taking handfuls of money out of my pocket, to make it seem cheap, anyway,” she retorted. “I just found a young man doing something to a horse’s leg with a sponge and a pail. And I held out one sovereign, and I said, ‘Do you know what this is?’ He said, ‘No,’ and he’d call his father. And the old man came, and he said it was a spade guinea; and he said was it my own to do as I liked with, and I said ‘Yes’; and I asked about the pony-cart, and I said he could have the guinea if he’d drive us in to Rochester. And his name is S. Crispin. And he said, ‘Right oh.’ ”
It was a new sensation to be driven in a smart ponytrap along pretty country roads; it was very pleasant too (which is not always the case with new sensations), quite apart from the beautiful plans of spending the money which each child made as they went along, silently of course and quite to itself, for they felt it would never have done to let the old innkeeper hear them talk in the affluent sort of way they were thinking. The old man put them down by the bridge at their request.
“If you were going to buy a carriage and horses, where would you go?” asked Cyril, as if he were only asking for the sake of something to say.
“Billy Peasemarsh, at the Saracen’s Head,” said the old man promptly. “Though all forbid I should recommend any man where it’s a question of horses, no more than I’d take anybody else’s recommending if I was a-buying one. But if your pa’s thinking of a turnoutv of any sort, there ain’t a straighter man in Rochester, nor a civiller spoken, than Billy, though I says it.”
“Thank you,” said Cyril. “The Saracen’s Head.”
And now the children began to see one of the laws of nature turn upside down and stand on its head like an acrobat. Any grown-up persons would tell you that money is hard to get and easy to spend. But the fairy money had been easy to get, and spending it was not only hard, it was almost impossible. The tradespeople of Rochester seemed to shrink, to a tradesperson, from the glittering fairy gold (“furrin money” they called it, for the most part). To begin with, Anthea, who had had the misfortune to sit on her hat earlier in the day, wished to buy another. She chose a very beautiful one, trimmed with pink roses and the blue breasts of peacocks. It was marked in the window, “Paris Model, three guineas.”
“I’m glad,” she said, “because, if it says guineas, it means guineas, and not sovereigns, which we haven’t got.”
But when she took three of the spade guineas in her hand, which was by this time rather dirty owing to her not having put on gloves before going to the gravel-pit, the black-silk young lady in the shop looked very hard at her, and went and whispered something to an older and uglier lady, also in black silk, and then they gave her back the money and said it was not current coin.
“It’s good money,” said Anthea, “and it’s my own.”
“I daresay,” said the lady, “but it’s not the kind of money that’s fashionable now, and we don’t care about taking it.”
“I believe they think we’ve stolen it,” said Anthea, rejoining the others in the street; “if we had gloves they wouldn’t think we were so dishonest. It’s my hands being so dirty fills their minds with doubts.”
So they chose a humble shop, and the girls bought cotton gloves, the kind at sixpence three-farthings, but when they offered a guinea the woman looked at it through her spectacles and said she had no change; so the gloves had to be paid for out of Cyril’s two-and-sevenpence that he meant to buy rabbits with, and so had the green imitation crocodile-skin purse at nine-pence-halfpenny which had been bought at the same time. They tried several more shops, the kinds where you buy toys and scent, and silk handkerchiefs and books, and fancy boxes of stationery, and photographs of objects of interest in the vicinity. But nobody cared to change a guinea that day in Rochester, and as they went from shop to shop they got dirtier and dirtier, and their hair got more and more untidy, and Jane slipped and fell down on a part of the road where a water-cart had just gone by. Also they got very hungry, but they found no one would give them anything to eat for their guineas. After trying two pastrycooks in vain, they became so hungry, perhaps from the smell of the cake in the shops, as Cyril suggested, that they formed a plan of campaign in whispers and carried it out in desperation. They marched into a third pastrycook’s—Beale his name was—and before the people behind the counter could interfere each child had seized three new penny buns, clapped the three together between its dirty hands, and taken a big bite out of the triple sandwich. Then they stood at bay, with the twelve buns in their hands and their mouths very full indeed. The shocked pastrycook bounded round the corner.
Mr. Beale snatched the coin and bit it
“Here,” said Cyril, speaking as distinctly as he could, and holding out the guinea he got ready before entering the shop, “pay yourself out of that.”
Mr. Beale snatched the coin, bit it, and put it in his pocket.
“Off you go,” he said, brief and stern like the man in the song.
“But the change?” said Anthea, who, had a saving mind.
“Change!” said the man. “I’ll change you! Hout you goes; and you may think yourselves lucky I don’t send for the police to find out where you got it!”
In the Castle Gardens the millionaires finished the buns, and though the curranty softness of these were delicious, and acted like a charm in raising the spirits of the party, yet even the stoutest heart quailed at the thought of venturing to sound Mr. Billy Peasemarsh at the Saracen’s Head on the subject of a horse and carriage. The boys would have given up the idea, but Jane was always a hopeful child, and Anthea generally an obstinate one, and their earnestness prevailed.
The whole party, by this time indescribably dirty, therefore betook itself to the Saracen’s Head. The yard-method of attack having been successful at The Chequers was tried again here. Mr. Peasemarsh was in the yard, and Robert opened the business in these terms—
“They tell me you have a lot of horses and carriages to sell.” It had been agreed that Robert should be spokesman, because in books it is always the gentlemen who buy horses, and not ladies, and Cyril had had his go at the Blue Boar.
“They tell you true, young man,” said Mr. Peasemarsh. He was a long lean man, with very blue eyes and a tight mouth and narrow lips.
“We should like to buy some, please,” said Robert politely.
“I daresay you would.”
“Will you show us a few, please? To choose from.”
“Who are you a-kiddin of?” inquired Mr. Billy Peasemarsh. “Was you sent here of a message?”
“I tell you,” said Robert, “we want to buy some horses and carriages, and a man told us you were straight and civil spoken, but I shouldn’t wonder if he was mistaken.”
“Upon my sacred!” said Mr. Peasemarsh. “Shall I trot the whole stable out for your Honour’s worship to see? Or shall I send round to the Bishop’s to see if he’s a nag or two to dispose of?”
“Please do,” said Robert, “if it’s not too much trouble. It would be very kind of you.”
Mr. Peasemarsh put his hands in his pockets and laughed, and they did not like the way he did it. Then he shouted “Willum!”
A stooping ostler appeared in a stable door.
“Here, Willum, come and look at this ‘ere young dook! Wants to buy the whole stud, lock, stock, and bar’l. And ain’t got tuppencew in his pocket to bless hisself with, I’ll go bail!”x
Willum’s eyes followed his master’s pointing thumb with contemptuous interest.
“Do ’e, for sure?” he said.
But Robert spoke, though both the girls were now pulling at his jacket and begging him to “come along.” He spoke, and he was very angry; he said:
“I’m not a young duke, and I never pretended to be. And as for tuppence—what do you call this?” And before the others could stop him he had pulled out two fat handfuls of shining guineas, and held them out for Mr. Peasemarsh to look at. He did look. He snatched one up in his finger and thumb. He bit it, and Jane expected him to say, “The best horse in my stables is at your service.” But the others knew better. Still it was a blow, even to the most desponding, when he said shortly:
“Willum, shut the yard doors,” and Willum grinned and went to shut them.
“Good-afternoon,” said Robert hastily; “we shan’t buy any of your horses now, whatever you say, and I hope it’ll be a lesson to you.” He had seen a little side gate open, and was moving towards it as he spoke. But Billy Peasemarsh put himself in the way.
“Not so fast, you young off-scouring!”y he said. “Willum, fetch the pleece.”
Willum went. The children stood huddled together like frightened sheep, and Mr. Peasemarsh spoke to them till the pleece arrived. He said many things. Among other things he said:
“Nice lot you are, aren’t you, coming tempting honest men with your guineas!”
“They are our guineas,” said Cyril boldly.
“Oh, of course we don’t know all about that, no more we don‘t—oh no—course not! And dragging little gells into it, too. ’Ere—I’ll let the gells go if you’ll come along to the pleece quiet.”
“We won’t be let go,” said Jane heroically; “not without the boys. It’s our money just as much as theirs, you wicked old man.”
“Where’d you get it, then?” said the man, softening slightly, which was not at all what the boys expected when Jane began to call names.
Jane cast a silent glance of agony at the others.
“Lost your tongue, eh? Got it fast enough when it’s for calling names with. Come, speak up! Where’d you get it?”
“Out of the gravel-pit,” said truthful Jane.
“Next article,” said the man.
“I tell you we did,” Jane said. “There’s a fairy there—all over brown fur—with ears like a bat’s and eyes like a snail’s, and he gives you a wish a day, and they all come true.”
“Touched in the head, eh?” said the man in a low voice, “all the more shame to you boys dragging the poor afflicted child into your sinful burglaries.”
“She’s not mad; it’s true,” said Anthea; “there is a fairy. If I ever see him again I’ll wish for something for you; at least I would if vengeance wasn’t wicked—so there!”
“Lor’ lumme,”z said Billy Peasemarsh, “if there ain’t another on ’em!”
And now Willum came back with a spiteful grin on his face, and at his back a policeman, with whom Mr. Peasemarsh spoke long in a hoarse earnest whisper.
“I daresay you’re right,” said the policeman at last. “Anyway, I’ll take ’em up on a charge of unlawful possession, pending inquiries. And the magistrate will deal with the case. Send the afflicted ones to a home, as likely as not, and the boys to a reformatory. Now then, come along, youngsters! No use making a fuss. You bring the gells along, Mr. Peasemarsh, sir, and I’ll shepherd the boys.”
Speechless with rage and horror, the four children were driven along the streets of Rochester. Tears of anger and shame blinded them, so that when Robert ran right into a passer-by he did not recognize her till a well-known voice said, “Well, if ever I did! Oh, Master Robert, whatever have you been a doing of now?” And another voice, quite as well known, said, “Panty; want go own Panty!”
They had run into Martha and the baby!
Martha behaved admirably. She refused to believe a word of the policeman’s story, or of Mr. Peasemarsh’s either, even when they made Robert turn out his pockets in an archway and show the guineas.
They had run into Martha and the baby!
“I don’t see nothing,” she said. “You’ve gone out of your senses, you two! There ain’t any gold there—only the poor child’s hands, all over crockaa and dirt, and like the very chimbley.ab Oh, that I should ever see the day!”
And the children thought this very noble of Martha, even if rather wicked, till they remembered how the Fairy had promised that the servants should never notice any of the fairy gifts. So of course Martha couldn’t see the gold, and so was only speaking the truth, and that was quite right, of course, but not extra noble.
It was getting dusk when they reached the police-station. The policeman told his tale to an inspector, who sat in a large bare room with a thing like a clumsy nursery-fenderac at one end to put prisoners in. Robert wondered whether it was a cell or a dock.
“Produce the coins, officer,” said the inspector.
“Turn out your pockets,” said the constable.
Cyril desperately plunged his hands in his pockets, stood still a moment, and then began to laugh—an odd sort of laugh that hurt, and that felt much more like crying. His pockets were empty. So were the pockets of the others. For of course at sunset all the fairy gold had vanished away.
“Turn out your pockets, and stop that noise,” said the inspector. Cyril turned out his pockets, every one of the nine which enriched his Norfolk suit. And every pocket was empty.
“Well!” said the inspector.
“I don’t know how they done it—artful little beggars! They walked in front of me the ’ole way, so as for me to keep my eye on them and not to attract a crowd and obstruct the traffic.”
“It’s very remarkable,” said the inspector, frowning.
“If you’ve quite done a-browbeating of the innocent children,” said Martha, “I’ll hire a private carriage and we’ll drive home to their papa’s mansion. You’ll hear about this again, young man! -I told you they hadn’t got any gold, when you were pretending to see it in their poor helpless hands. It’s early in the day for a constable on duty not to be able to trust his own eyes. As to the other one, the less said the better; he keeps the Saracen’s Head, and he knows best what his liquor’s like.”
He said, “Now then!” to the policeman and Mr. Peasemarsh
“Take them away, for goodness’ sake,” said the inspector crossly. But as they left the police-station he said, “Now then!” to the policeman and Mr. Peasemarsh, and he said it twenty times as crossly as he had spoken to Martha.
Martha was as good as her word. She took them home in a very grand carriage, because the carrier’s cart was gone, and, though she had stood by them so nobly with the police, she was so angry with them as soon as they were alone for “trapseing into Rochester by themselves,” that none of them dared to mention the old man with the pony-cart from the village who was waiting for them in Rochester. And so, after one day of boundless wealth, the children found themselves sent to bed in deep disgrace, and only enriched by two pairs of cotton gloves, dirty inside because of the state of the hands they had been put on to cover, an imitation crocodile-skin purse, and twelve penny buns, long since digested.
The thing that troubled them most was the fear that the old gentleman’s guinea might have disappeared at sunset with all the rest, so they went down to the village next day to apologize for not meeting him in Rochester, and to see. They found him very friendly. The guinea had not disappeared, and he had bored a hole in it and hung it on his watch-chain. As for the guinea the baker took, the children felt they could not care whether it had vanished or not, which was not perhaps very honest, but on the other hand was not wholly unnatural. But afterwards this preyed on Anthea’s mind, and at last she secretly sent twelve stamps by post to “Mr. Beale, Baker, Rochester.” Inside she wrote, “To pay for the buns.” I hope the guinea did disappear, for that pastrycook was really not at all a nice man, and, besides, penny buns are seven for sixpence in all really respectable shops.
CHAPTER III
BEING WANTED
The morning after the children had been the possessors of boundless wealth, and had been unable to buy anything really useful or enjoyable with it, except two pairs of cotton gloves, twelve penny buns, an imitation crocodile-skin purse, and a ride in a pony-cart, they awoke without any of the enthusiastic happiness which they had felt on the previous day when they remembered how they had had the luck to find a Psammead, or Sand-fairy; and to receive its promise to grant them a new wish every day. For now they had had two wishes, Beauty and Wealth, and neither had exactly made them happy. But the happening of strange things, even if they are not completely pleasant things, is more amusing than those times when nothing happens but meals, and they are not always completely pleasant, especially on the days when it is cold mutton or hash.
There was no chance of talking things over before breakfast, because everyone overslept itself, as it happened, and it needed a vigorous and determined struggle to get dressed so as to be only ten minutes late for breakfast. During this meal some efforts were made to deal with the question of the Psammead in an impartial spirit, but it is very difficult to discuss anything thoroughly and at the same time to attend faithfully to your baby brother’s breakfast needs. The Baby was particularly lively that morning. He not only wriggled his body through the bar of his high chair, and hung by his head, choking and purple, but he collared a tablespoon with desperate suddenness, hit Cyril heavily on the head with it, and then cried because it was taken away from him. He put his fat fist in his bread-and-milk, and demanded “nam,” which was only allowed for tea. He sang, he put his feet on the table—he clamoured to “go walky.” The conversation was something like this:
“Look here—about that Sand-fairy-Look out!—he’ll have the milk over.”
Milk removed to a safe distance.
“Yes—about that Fairy—No, Lamb dear, give Panther the narky poon.”
Then Cyril tried. “Nothing we’ve had yet has turned out—He nearly had the mustard that time!”
“I wonder whether we’d better wish—Hullo!—you’ve done it now, my boy!” And, in a flash of glass and pink baby-paws, the bowl of golden carp in the middle of the table rolled on its side, and poured a flood of mixed water and goldfish into the Baby’s lap and into the laps of the others.
Everyone was almost as much upset as the goldfish: the Lamb only remaining calm. When the pool on the floor had been mopped up, and the leaping, gasping goldfish had been collected and put back in the water, the Baby was taken away to be entirely redressed by Martha, and most of the others had to change completely. The pinafores and jackets that had been bathed in goldfish-and-water were hung out to dry, and then it turned out that Jane must either mend the dress she had torn the day before or appear all day in her best petticoat. It was white and soft and frilly, and trimmed with lace, and very, very pretty, quite as pretty as a frock, if not more so. Only it was not a frock, and Martha’s word was law. She wouldn’t let Jane wear her best frock, and she refused to listen for a moment to Robert’s suggestion that Jane should wear her best petticoat and call it a dress.
“It’s not respectable,” she said. And when people say that, it’s no use anyone’s saying anything. You will find this out for yourselves some day.
So there was nothing for it but for Jane to mend her frock. The hole had been torn the day before when she happened to tumble down in the High Street of Rochester, just where a water-cart had passed on its silvery way. She had grazed her knee, and her stocking was much more than grazed, and her dress was cut by the same stone which had attended to the knee and the stocking. Of course the others were not such sneaks as to abandon a comrade in misfortune, so they all sat on the grass-plot round the sundial, and Jane darned away for dear life. The Lamb was still in the hands of Martha having its clothes changed, so conversation was possible.
Anthea and Robert timidly tried to conceal their inmost thought, which was that the Psammead was not to be trusted; but Cyril said:
“Speak out—say what you’ve got to say—I hate hinting, and ‘don’t know,’ and sneakish ways like that.”
So then Robert said, as in honour bound: “Sneak yourself—Anthea and me weren’t so goldfishy as you two were, so we got changed quicker, and we’ve had time to think it over, and if you ask me—”
“I didn’t ask you,” said Jane, biting off a needleful of thread as she had always been strictly forbidden to do.
“I don’t care who asks or who doesn’t,” said Robert, “but Anthea and I think the Sammyadd is a spiteful brute. If it can give us our wishes I suppose it can give itself its own, and I feel almost sure it wishes every time that our wishes shan’t do us any good. Let’s let the tiresome beast alone, and just go and have a jolly good game of forts, on our own, in the chalk-pit.”
(You will remember that the happily situated house where these children were spending their holidays lay between a chalk-quarry and a gravel-pit.)
Cyril and Jane were more hopeful—they generally were.
“I don’t think the Sammyadd does it on purpose,” Cyril said; “and, after all, it was silly to wish for boundless wealth. Fifty pounds in two-shilling pieces would have been much more sensible. And wishing to be beautiful as the day was simply donkeyish. I don’t want to be disagreeable, but it was. We must try to find a really useful wish, and wish it.”
Jane dropped her work and said:
“I think so too, it’s too silly to have a chance like this and not use it. I never heard of anyone else outside a book who had such a chance; there must be simply heaps of things we could wish for that wouldn’t turn out Dead Sea fish,ad like these two things have. Do let’s think hard, and wish something nice, so that we can have a real jolly day—what there is left of it.”
Jane darned away again like mad, for time was indeed getting on, and everyone began to talk at once. If you had been there you could not possibly have made head or tail of the talk, but these children were used to talking “by fours,”ae as soldiers march, and each of them could say what it had to say quite comfortably, and listen to the agreeable sound of its own voice, and at the same time have three-quarters of two sharp ears to spare for listening to what the others said. That is an easy example in multiplication of vulgar fractions, but, as I daresay you can’t do even that, I won’t ask you to tell me whether % x 2 = 1½, but I will ask you to believe me that this was the amount of ear each child was able to lend to the others. Lending ears was common in Roman times,af as we learn from Shakespeare; but I fear I am getting too instructive.
When the frock was darned, the start for the gravel-pit was delayed by Martha’s insisting on everybody’s washing its hands—which was nonsense, because nobody had been doing anything at all, except Jane, and how can you get dirty doing nothing? That is a difficult question, and I cannot answer it on paper. In real life I could very soon show you—or you me, which is much more likely.
During the conversation in which the six ears were lent (there were four children, so that sum comes right), it had been decided that fifty pounds in two-shilling pieces was the right wish to have. And the lucky children, who could have anything in the wide world by just wishing for it, hurriedly started for the gravel-pit to express their wishes to the Psammead. Martha caught them at the gate, and insisted on their taking the Baby with them.
“Not want him indeed! Why, everybody ’ud want him, a duck!ag with all their hearts they would; and you know you promised your ma to take him out every blessed day,” said Martha.
“I know we did,” said Robert in gloom, “but I wish the Lamb wasn’t quite so young and small. It would be much better fun taking him out.”
“He’ll mend of his youngness with time,” said Martha; “and as for his smallness, I don’t think you’d fancy carrying of him any more, however big he was. Besides he can walk a bit, bless his precious fat legs, a ducky! He feels the benefit of the new-laid air, so he does, a pet!”
The lucky children hurriedly started for the gravel-pit
With this and a kiss, she plumped the Lamb into Anthea’s arms, and went back to make new pinafores on the sewing-machine. She was a rapid performer on this instrument.
The Lamb laughed with pleasure, and said, “Walky wif Panty,” and rode on Robert’s back with yells of joy, and tried to feed Jane with stones, and altogether made himself so agreeable that nobody could long be sorry that he was of the party.
The enthusiastic Jane even suggested that they should devote a week’s wishes to assuring the Baby’s future, by asking such gifts for him as the good fairies give to Infant Princes in proper fairy-tales, but Anthea soberly reminded her that as the Sand-fairy’s wishes only lasted till sunset they could not ensure any benefit to the Baby’s later years; and Jane owned that it would be better to wish for fifty pounds in two-shilling pieces, and buy the Lamb a three-pound-fifteen rocking-horse, like those in the Army and Navy Stores list, with part of the money.
It was settled that, as soon as they had wished for the money and got it, they would get Mr. Crispin to drive them into Rochester again, taking Martha with them, if they could not get out of taking her. And they would make a list of the things they really wanted before they started. Full of high hopes and excellent resolutions, they went round the safe slow cart-road to the gravel-pits, and as they went in between the mounds of gravel a sudden thought came to them, and would have turned their ruddy cheeks pale if they had been children in a book. Being real live children, it only made them stop and look at each other with rather blank and silly expressions. For now they remembered that yesterday, when they had asked the Psammead for boundless wealth, and it was getting ready to fill the quarry with the minted gold of bright guineas—millions of them—it had told the children to run along outside the quarry for fear they should be buried alive in the heavy splendid treasure. And they had run. And so it happened that they had not had time to mark the spot where the Psammead was, with a ring of stones, as before. And it was this thought that put such silly expressions on their faces.
“Never mind,” said the hopeful Jane, “we’ll soon find him.”
But this, though easily said, was hard in the doing. They looked and they looked, and though they found their seaside spades, nowhere could they find the Sand-fairy.
At last they had to sit down and rest—not at all because they were weary or disheartened, of course, but because the Lamb insisted on being put down, and you cannot look very carefully after anything you may have happened to lose in the sand if you have an active baby to look after at the same time. Get someone to drop your best knife in the sand next time you go to the seaside, and then take your baby brother with you when you go to look for it, and you will see that I am right.
The Lamb, as Martha had said, was feeling the benefit of the country air, and he was as frisky as a sandhopper.ah The elder ones longed to go on talking about the new wishes they would have when (or if) they found the Psammead again. But the Lamb wished to enjoy himself.
He watched his opportunity and threw a handful of sand into Anthea’s face, and then suddenly burrowed his own head in the sand and waved his fat legs in the air. Then of course the sand got into his eyes, as it had into Anthea’s, and he howled.
The thoughtful Robert had brought one solid brown bottle of ginger-beer with him, relying on a thirst that had never yet failed him. This had to be uncorked hurriedly—it was the only wet thing within reach, and it was necessary to wash the sand out of the Lamb’s eyes somehow. Of course the ginger hurt horribly, and he howled more than ever. And, amid his anguish of kicking, the bottle was upset and the beautiful ginger-beer frothed out into the sand and was lost for ever.
It was then that Robert, usually a very patient brother, so far forgot himself as to say:
“Anybody would want him, indeed! Only they don’t; Martha doesn’t, not really, or she’d jolly well keep him with her. He’s a little nuisance, that’s what he is. It’s too bad. I only wish everybody did want him with all their hearts; we might get some peace in our lives.”
The Lamb stopped howling now, because Jane had suddenly remembered that there is only one safe way of taking things out of little children’s eyes, and that is with your own soft wet tongue. It is quite easy if you love the Baby as much as you ought to.
Then there was a little silence. Robert was not proud of himself for having been so cross, and the others were not proud of him either. You often notice that sort of silence when someone has said something it ought not to—and everyone else holds its tongue and waits for the one who oughtn’t to have said it is sorry.
The silence was broken by a sigh—a breath suddenly let out. The children’s heads turned as if there had been a string tied to each nose, and someone had pulled all the strings at once.
And everyone saw the Sand-fairy sitting quite close to them, with the expression which it used as a smile on its hairy face.
“Good-morning,” it said; “I did that quite easily! Everyone wants him now.”
“It doesn’t matter,” said Robert sulkily, because he knew he had been behaving rather like a pig. “No matter who wants him—there’s no one here to—anyhow.”
“Ingratitude,” said the Psammead, “is a dreadful vice.”
“We’re not ungrateful,” Jane made haste to say, “but we didn’t really want that wish. Robert only just said it. Can’t you take it back and give us a new one?”
“No—I can’t,” the Sand-fairy said shortly; “chopping and changing—it’s not business. You ought to be careful what you do wish. There was a little boy once, he’d wished for a Plesiosaurus instead of an Ichthyosaurus, because he was too lazy to remember the easy names of everyday things, and his father had been very vexed with him, and had made him go to bed before tea-time, and wouldn’t let him go out in the nice flint boat along with the other children—it was the annual school-treat next day—and he came and flung himself down near me on the morning of the treat, and he kicked his little prehistoric legs about and said he wished he was dead. And of course then he was.”
“How awful!” said the children all together.
“Only till sunset, of course,” the Psammead said; “still it was quite enough for his father and mother. And he caught it when he woke up—I can tell you. He didn’t turn to stone—I forget why—but there must have been some reason. They didn’t know being dead is only being asleep, and you’re bound to wake up somewhere or other, either where you go to sleep or in some better place. You may be sure he caught it, giving them such a turn. Why, he wasn’t allowed to taste Megatherium for a month after that. Nothing but oysters and periwinkles, and common things like that.”
All the children were quite crushed by this terrible tale. They looked at the Psammead in horror. Suddenly the Lamb perceived that something brown and furry was near him.
“Poof, poof, poofy,” he said, and made a grab.
“It’s not a pussy,” Anthea was beginning, when the Sand-fairy leaped back.
“Oh, my left whisker!” it said; “don’t let him touch me. He’s wet.”
Its fur stood on end with horror—and indeed a good deal of the ginger-beer had been spilt on the blue smock of the Lamb.
The Psammead dug with its hands and feet, and vanished in an instant and a whirl of sand.
“Poof, poof, poofy,” he said, and made a grab
The children marked the spot with a ring of stones.
“We may as well get along home,” said Robert. “I’ll say I’m sorry; but anyway if it’s no good it’s no harm, and we know where the sandy thing is for tomorrow.”
The others were noble. No one reproached Robert at all. Cyril picked up the Lamb, who was now quite himself again, and off they went by the safe cart-road.
The cart-road from the gravel-pits joins the road almost directly.
At the gate into the road the party stopped to shift the Lamb from Cyril’s back to Robert’s. And as they paused a very smart open carriage came in sight, with a coachman and a groom on the box, and inside the carriage a lady—very grand indeed, with a dress all white lace and red ribbons and a parasol all red and white—and a white fluffy dog on her lap with a red ribbon round its neck. She looked at the children, and particularly at the Baby, and she smiled at him. The children were used to this, for the Lamb was, as all the servants said, a “very taking child.” So they waved their hands politely to the lady and expected her to drive on. But she did not. Instead she made the coachman stop. And she beckoned to Cyril, and when he went up to the carriage she said:
“What a dear darling duck of a baby! Oh, I should so like to adopt it! Do you think its mother would mind?”
“She’d mind very much indeed,” said Anthea shortly.
“Oh, but I should bring it up in luxury, you know. I am Lady Chittenden. You must have seen my photograph in the illustrated papers. They call me a beauty, you know, but of course that’s all nonsense. Anyway—”
She opened the carriage door and jumped out. She had the wonderfullest red high-heeled shoes with silver buckles. “Let me hold him a minute,” she said. And she took the Lamb and held him very awkwardly, as if she was not used to babies.
Then suddenly she jumped into the carriage with the Lamb in her arms and slammed the door and said, “Drive on!”
The Lamb roared, the little white dog barked, and the coachman hesitated.
“Drive on, I tell you!” cried the lady; and the coachman did, for, as he said afterwards, it was as much as his place was worth not to.
The four children looked at each other, and then with one accord they rushed after the carriage and held on behind. Down the dusty road went the smart carriage, and after it, at double-quick time, ran the twinkling legs of the Lamb’s brothers and sisters.
The Lamb howled louder and louder, but presently his howls changed by slow degree to hiccupy gurgles, and then all was still and they knew he had gone to sleep.
The carriage went on, and the eight feet that twinkled through the dust were growing quite stiff and tired before the carriage stopped at the lodge of a grand park. The children crouched down behind the carriage, and the lady got out. She looked at the Baby as it lay on the carriage seat, and hesitated.
“The darling—I won’t disturb it,” she said, and went into the lodge to talk to the woman there about a setting of Buff Orpingtonai eggs that had not turned out well.
The coachman and footman sprang from the box and bent over the sleeping Lamb.
“Fine boy—wish he was mine,” said the coachman.
“He wouldn’t favour you much,” said the groom sourly; “too ’andsome.”
At double-quick time ran the twinkling legs of the Lamb’s brothers and sisters
The coachman pretended not to hear. He said:
“Wonder at her now—I do really! Hates kids. Got none of her own, and can’t abide other folkses’.”
The children, crouching in the white dust under the carriage, exchanged uncomfortable glances.
“Tell you what,” the coachman went on firmly, “blowed if I don’t hide the little nipper in the hedge and tell her his brothers took ’im! Then I’ll come back for him afterwards.”
“No, you don’t,” said the footman. “I’ve took to that kid so as never was. If anyone’s to have him, it’s me—so there!”
Next minute the two were fighting here and there
“Stow your gab!” the coachman rejoined. “You don’t want no kids, and, if you did, one kid’s the same as another to you. But I’m a married man and a judge of breed. I knows a first-rate yearling when I sees him. I’m a-goin’ to ’ave him, an’ least said soonest mended.”
“I should ‘a’ thought,” said the footman sneeringly, “you’d a’most enough. What with Alfred, an’ Albert, an’ Louise, an’ Victor Stanley, and Helena Beatrice, and another—”
The coachman hit the footman in the chin—the footman hit the coachman in the waistcoat—the next minute the two were fighting here and there, in and out, up and down, and all over everywhere, and the little dog jumped on the box of the carriage and began barking like mad.
Cyril, still crouching in the dust, waddled on bent legs to the side of the carriage farthest from the battlefield. He unfastened the door of the carriage—the two men were far too much occupied with their quarrel to notice anything—took the Lamb in his arms, and, still stooping, carried the sleeping baby a dozen yards along the road to where a stile led into a wood. The others followed, and there among the hazels and young oaks and sweet chestnuts, covered by high strong-scented bracken, they all lay hidden till the angry voices of the men were hushed at the angry voice of the red-and-white lady, and, after a long and anxious search, the carriage at last drove away.
“My only hat!” said Cyril, drawing a deep breath as the sound of wheels at last died away. “Everyone does want him now—and no mistake! That Sammyadd has done us again! Tricky brute! For, any sake, let’s get the kid safe home.”
So they peeped out, and finding on the right hand only lonely white road, and nothing but lonely white road on the left, they took courage, and the road, Anthea carrying the sleeping Lamb.
Adventures dogged their footsteps. A boy with a bundle of faggots on his back dropped his bundle by the roadside and asked to look at the Baby, and then offered to carry him; but Anthea was not to be caught that way twice. They all walked on, but the boy followed, and Cyril and Robert couldn’t make him go away till they had more than once invited him to smell their fists. Afterwards a little girl in a blue-and-white checked pinafore actually followed them for a quarter of a mile crying for “the precious Baby,” and then she was only got rid of by threats of tying her to a tree in the wood with all their pocket-handkerchiefs. “So that the bears can come and eat you as soon as it gets dark,” said Cyril severely. Then she went off crying. It presently seemed wise, to the brothers and sisters of the Baby, who was wanted by everyone, to hide in the hedge whenever they saw anyone coming, and thus they managed to prevent the Lamb from arousing the inconvenient affection of a milkman, a stone-breaker, and a man who drove a cart with a paraffin barrel at the back of it. They were nearly home when the worst thing of all happened. Turning a corner suddenly they came upon two vans, a tent, and a company of gipsies encamped by the side of the road. The vans were hung all round with wicker chairs and cradles, and flower-stands and feather brushes. A lot of ragged children were industriously making dust-pies in the road, two men lay on the grass smoking, and three women were doing the family washing in an old red watering-can with the top broken off.
In a moment all the gipsies, men, women, and children, surrounded Anthea and the Baby.
“Let me hold him, little lady,” said one of the gipsy women, who had a mahogany-coloured face and dust-coloured hair; “I won’t hurt a hair of his head, the little picture!”
“I’d rather not,” said Anthea.
“Let me have him,” said the other woman, whose face was also of the hue of mahogany, and her hair jet-black, in greasy curls. “I’ve nineteen of my own, so I have.”
“No,” said Anthea bravely, but her heart beat so that it nearly choked her.
Then one of the men pushed forward.
“Swelp me if it ain‘t!” he cried, “my own long-lost cheild! Have he a strawberry mark on his left ear? No? Then he’s my own babby, stolen from me in hinnocent hinfancy. ’And ‘im over—and we’ll not ’ave the law on yer this time.”
He snatched the Baby from Anthea, who turned scarlet and burst into tears of pure rage.
The others were standing quite still; this was much the most terrible thing that had ever happened to them. Even being taken up by the police in Rochester was nothing to this. Cyril was quite white, and his hands trembled a little, but he made a sign to the others to shut up. He was silent a minute, thinking hard. Then he said:
“We don’t want to keep him if he’s yours. But you see he’s used to us. You shall have him if you want him.”
“No, no!” cried Anthea—and Cyril glared at her.
“Of course we want him,” said the women, trying to get the Baby out of the man’s arms. The Lamb howled loudly.
“Oh, he’s hurt!” shrieked Anthea; and Cyril, in a savage undertone, bade her “Stow it!”
“You trust to me,” he whispered. “Look here,” he went on, “he’s awfully tiresome with people he doesn’t know very well. Suppose we stay here a bit till he gets used to you, and then when it’s bedtime I give you my word of honour we’ll go away and let you keep him if you want to. And then when we’re gone you can decide which of you is to have him, as you all want him so much.”
He snatched the Baby from Anthea
“That’s fair enough,” said the man who was holding the Baby, trying to loosen the red neckerchief which the Lamb had caught hold of and drawn round his mahogany throat so tight that he could hardly breathe. The gipsies whispered together, and Cyril took the chance to whisper too. He said, “Sunset! we’ll get away then.”
And then his brothers and sisters were filled with wonder and admiration at his having been so clever as to remember this.
“Oh, do let him come to us!” said Jane. “See we’ll sit down here and take care of him for you till he gets used to you.”
“What about dinner?” said Robert suddenly. The others looked at him with scorn. “Fancy bothering about your beastly dinner when your br—I mean when the Baby”—Jane whispered hotly. Robert carefully winked at her and went on:
“You won’t mind my just running home to get our dinner?” he said to the gipsy; “I can bring it out here in a basket.”
His brother and sisters felt themselves very noble, and despised him. They did not know his thoughtful secret intention. But the gipsies did in a minute.
“Oh yes!” they said; “and then fetch the police with a pack of lies about it being your baby instead of ours! D’jever catch a weasel asleep?” they asked.
“If you’re hungry you can pick a bit along of us,” said the light-haired gipsy woman, not unkindly. “Here, Levi, that blessed kid’ll howl all his buttons off. Give him to the little lady, and let’s see if they can’t get him used to us a bit.”
So the Lamb was handed back; but the gipsies crowded so closely that he could not possibly stop howling. Then the man with the red handkerchief said:
“Here, Pharaoh, make up the fire; and you girls see to the pot. Give the kid a chanst.” So the gipsies, very much against their will, went off to their work, and the children and the Lamb were left sitting on the grass.
“He’ll be all right at sunset,” Jane whispered. “But, oh, it is awful! Suppose they are frightfully angry when they come to their senses! They might beat us, or leave us tied to trees, or something.”
“No, they won’t,” Anthea said. (“Oh, my Lamb, don’t cry any more, it’s all right, Panty’s got oo, duckie!”) “They aren’t unkind people, or they wouldn’t be going to give us any dinner.”
“Dinner?” said Robert. “I won’t touch their nasty dinner. It would choke me!”
The others thought so too then. But when the dinner was ready—it turned out to be supper, and happened between four and five—they were all glad enough to take what they could get. It was boiled rabbit, with onions, and some bird rather like a chicken, but stringier about its legs and with a stronger taste. The Lamb had bread soaked in hot water and brown sugar sprinkled on the top. He liked this very much, and consented to let the two gipsy women feed him with it, as he sat on Anthea’s lap. All that long hot afternoon Robert and Cyril and Anthea and Jane had to keep the Lamb amused and happy, while the gipsies looked eagerly on. By the time the shadows grew long and black across the meadows he had really “taken to” the woman with the light hair, and even consented to kiss his hand to the children, and to stand up and bow, with his hand on his chest—“like a gentleman”—to the two men. The whole gipsy camp was in raptures with him, and his brothers and sisters could not help taking some pleasure in showing off his accomplishments to an audience so interested and enthusiastic. But they longed for sunset.
“We’re getting into the habit of longing for sunset,” Cyril whispered. “How I do wish we could wish something really sensible, that would be of some use, so that we should be quite sorry when sunset came.
The shadows got longer and longer, and at last there were no separate shadows any more, but one soft glowing shadow over everything; for the sun was out of sight—behind the hill—but he had not really set yet. The people who make the laws about lighting bicycle lamps are the people who decide when the sun sets; he has to do it, too, to the minute, or they would know the reason why!
But the gipsies were getting impatient.
“Now, young uns,” the red-handkerchief man said, “it’s time you were laying of your heads on your pillowses—so it is! The kid’s all right and friendly with us now—so you just hand him over and sling that hook o’ yoursaj like you said.”
The women and children came crowding round the Lamb, arms were held out, fingers snapped invitingly, friendly faces beaming with admiring smiles; but all failed to tempt the loyal Lamb. He clung with arms and legs to Jane, who happened to be holding him, and uttered the gloomiest roar of the whole day.
“It’s no good,” the woman said, “hand the little popperak over, miss. We’ll soon quiet him.”
And still the sun would not set.
“Tell her about how to put him to bed,” whispered Cyril; “anything to gain time—and be ready to bolt when the sun really does make up its silly old mind to set.”
He consented to let the gipsy women feed him
“Yes, I’ll hand him over in just one minute,” Anthea began, talking very fast—“but do let me just tell you he has a warm bath every night and cold in the morning, and he has a crockery rabbit to go into the warm bath with him, and little Samuel saying his prayers in white china on a red cushion for the cold bath; and if you let the soap get into his eyes, the Lamb—”
“Lamb kyes,” said he—he had stopped roaring to listen.
The woman laughed. “As if I hadn’t never bath’d a babby!” she said. “Come—give us a hold of him. Come to ’Melia, my precious.”
“G’way, ugsie!” replied the Lamb at once.
“Yes, but,” Anthea went on, “about his meals; you really must let me tell you he has an apple or a banana every morning, and bread-and-milk for breakfast, and an egg for his tea sometimes, and—”
“I’ve brought up ten,” said the black-ringleted woman, “besides the others. Come, miss, ‘and ’im over—I can’t bear it no longer. I just must give him a hug.”
“We ain’t settled yet whose he’s to be, Esther,” said one of the men.
“It won’t be you, Esther, with seven of ‘em at your tail a’ready.”
“I ain’t so sure of that,” said Esther’s husband.
“And ain’t I nobody, to have a say neither?” said the husband of ’Melia.
Zillah, the girl, said, “An’ me? I’m a single girl—and no one but ’im to look after—I ought to have him.”
“Hold yer tongue!”
“Shut your mouth!”
“Don’t you show me no more of your imperence!”
Everyone was getting very angry. The dark gipsy faces were frowning and anxious-looking. Suddenly a change swept over them, as if some invisible sponge had wiped away these cross and anxious expressions, and left only a blank.
The children saw that the sun really had set. But they were afraid to move. And the gipsies were feeling so muddled, because of the invisible sponge that had washed all the feelings of the last few hours out of their hearts, that they could not say a word.
The children hardly dared to breathe. Suppose the gipsies, when they recovered speech, should be furious to think how silly they had been all day?
It was an awkward moment. Suddenly Anthea, greatly daring, held out the Lamb to the red-handkerchief man.
“Here he is!” she said.
The man drew back. “I shouldn’t like to deprive you, miss,” he said hoarsely.
“Anyone who likes can have my share of him,” said the other man.
“After all, I’ve got enough of my own,” said Esther.
“He’s a nice little chap, though,” said Amelia. She was the only one who now looked affectionately at the whimpering Lamb.
Zillah said, “If I don’t think I must have had a touch of the sun. I don’t want him.”
“Then shall we take him away?” said Anthea.
“Well, suppose you do,” said Pharaoh heartily, “and we’ll say no more about it!”
And with great haste all the gipsies began to be busy about their tents for the night. All but Amelia. She went with the children as far as the bend in the road—and there she said:
“Let me give him a kiss, miss—I don’t know what made us go for to behave so silly. Us gipsies don’t steal babies, whatever they may tell you when you’re naughty. We’ve enough of our own, mostly. But I’ve lost all mine.”
She leaned towards the Lamb; and he, looking in her eyes, unexpectedly put up a grubby soft paw and stroked her face.
“Poor, poor!” said the Lamb. And he let the gipsy woman kiss him, and, what is more, he kissed her brown cheek in return—a very nice kiss, as all his kisses are, and not a wet one like some babies give. The gipsy woman moved her finger about on his forehead, as if she had been writing something there, and the same with his chest and his hands and his feet; then she said:
“May he be brave, and have the strong head to think with, and the strong heart to love with, and the strong hands to work with, and the strong feet to travel with, and always come safe home to his own.” Then she said something in a strange language no one could understand, and suddenly added:
“Well, I must be saying ‘so long’—and glad to have made your acquaintance.” And she turned and went back to her home—the tent by the grassy roadside.
The children looked after her till she was out of sight. Then Robert said, “How silly of her! Even sunset didn’t put her right. What rot she talked!”
“Well,” said Cyril, “if you ask me, I think it was rather decent of her—”
“Decent?” said Anthea; “it was very nice indeed of her. I think she’s a dear.”
“She’s just too frightfully nice for anything,” said Jane.
And they went home—very late for tea and unspeakably late for dinner. Martha scolded, of course. But the Lamb was safe.
“I say—it turned out we wanted the Lamb as much as anyone,” said Robert, later.
“Of course.”
The gipsy woman moved her finger about on his forehead
“But do you feel different about it now the sun’s set?”
“No,” said all the others together.
“Then it’s lasted over sunset with us.”
“No, it hasn’t,” Cyril explained. “The wish didn’t do anything to us. We always wanted him with all our hearts when we were our proper selves, only we were all pigs this morning; especially you, Robert.” Robert bore this much with a strange calm.
“I certainly thought I didn’t want him this morning,” said he. “Perhaps I was a pig. But everything looked so different when we thought we were going to lose him.”
CHAPTER IV
WINGS
The next day was very wet—too wet to go out, and far too wet to think of disturbing a Sand-fairy so sensitive to water that he still, after thousands of years, felt the pain of once having had his left whisker wetted. It was a long day, and it was not till the afternoon that all the children suddenly decided to write letters to their mother. It was Robert who had the misfortune to upset the ink-pot—an unusually deep and full one—straight into that part of Anthea’s desk where she had long pretended that an arrangement of gum and cardboard painted with Indian ink was a secret drawer. It was not exactly Robert’s fault; it was only his misfortune that he chanced to be lifting the ink across the desk just at the moment when Anthea had got it open, and that that same moment should have been the one chosen by the Lamb to get under the table and break his squeaking bird. There was a sharp convenient wire inside the bird, and of course the Lamb ran the wire into Robert’s leg at once; and so, without anyone’s meaning to, the secret drawer was flooded with ink. At the same time a stream was poured over Anthea’s half-finished letter.
So that her letter was something like this:Darling Mother,I hope you are quite well, and I hope Granny is better. The other day we...Then came a flood of ink, and at the bottom these words in pencil—It was not me upset the ink, but it took such a time clearing up, so no more as it is post-time.-From your loving daughter,Anthea.
Robert’s letter had not even been begun. He had been drawing a ship on the blotting-paper while he was trying to think of what to say. And of course after the ink was upset he had to help Anthea to clean out her desk, and he promised to make her another secret drawer, better than the other. And she said, “Well, make it now.” So it was post-time and his letter wasn’t done. And the secret drawer wasn’t done either.
Cyril wrote a long letter, very fast, and then went to set a trap for slugs that he had read about in the Home-made Gardener, and when it was post-time the letter could not be found, and it never was found. Perhaps the slugs ate it.
Jane’s letter was the only one that went. She meant to tell her mother all about the Psammead—in fact they had all meant to do this—but she spent so long thinking how to spell the word that there was no time to tell the story properly, and it is useless to tell a story unless you do tell it properly, so she had to be contented with this—My dear Mother Dear,We are all as good as we can, like you told us to, and the Lamb has a little cold, but Martha says it is nothing, only he upset the goldfish into himself yesterday morning. When we were up at the sand-pit the other day we went round by the safe way where carts go, and we found a—
Half an hour went by before Jane felt quite sure that they could none of them spell Psammead. And they could not find it in the dictionary either, though they looked. Then Jane hastily finished her letter.We found a strange thing, but it is nearly post-time, so no more at present from your little girl,Jane.P.S.—If you could have a wish come true, what would you have?
Then the postman was heard blowing his horn, and Robert rushed out in the rain to stop his cart and give him the letter. And that was how it happened that, though all the children meant to tell their mother about the Sand-fairy, somehow or other she never got to know. There were other reasons why she never got to know, but these come later.
The next day Uncle Richard came and took them all to Maidstone in a wagonette—all except the Lamb. Uncle Richard was the very best kind of uncle. He bought them toys at Maidstone. He took them into a shop and let them choose exactly what they wanted, without any restrictions about price, and no nonsense about things being instructive. It is very wise to let children choose exactly what they like, because they are very foolish and inexperienced, and sometimes they will choose a really instructive thing without meaning to. This happened to Robert, who chose, at the last moment, and in a great hurry, a box with pictures on it of winged bulls with men’s heads and winged men with eagles’ heads. He thought there would be animals inside, the same as on the box. When he got it home it was a Sunday puzzle about ancient Nineveh! The others chose in haste, and were happy at leisure. Cyril had a model engine, and the girls had two dolls, as well as a china tea-set with forget-me-nots on it, to be “between them.” The boys’ “between them” was bow and arrows.
Then Uncle Richard took them on the beautiful Medwayal in a boat, and then they all had tea at a beautiful pastrycook’s, and when they reached home it was far too late to have any wishes that day.
They did not tell Uncle Richard anything about the Psammead. I do not know why. And they do not know why. But I daresay you can guess.
The day after Uncle Richard had behaved so handsomely was a very hot day indeed. The people who decide what the weather is to be, and put its orders down for it in the newspapers every morning, said afterwards that it was the hottest day there had been for years. They had ordered it to be “warmer—some showers,” and warmer it certainly was. In fact it was so busy being warmer that it had no time to attend to the order about showers, so there weren’t any.
Have you ever been up at five o’clock on a fine summer morning? It is very beautiful. The sunlight is pinky and yellowy, and all the grass and trees are covered with dew-diamonds. And all the shadows go the opposite way to the way they do in the evening, which is very interesting and makes you feel as though you were in a new other world.
Anthea awoke at five. She had made herself wake, and I must tell you how it is done, even if it keeps you waiting for the story to go on.
You get into bed at night, and lie down quite flat on your little back with your hands straight down by your sides. Then you say “I must wake up at five” (or six, or seven, or eight, or nine, or whatever the time is that you want), and as you say it you push your chin down on to your chest and then bang your head back on the pillow. And you do this as many times as there are ones in the time you want to wake up at. (It is quite an easy sum.) Of course everything depends on your really wanting to get up at five (or six, or seven, or eight, or nine); if you don’t really want to, it’s all of no use. But if you do—well, try it and see. Of course in this, as in doing Latin proses or getting into mischief, practice makes perfect.
Anthea was quite perfect.
At the very moment when she opened her eyes she heard the black-and-gold clock down in the dining-room strike eleven. So she knew it was three minutes to five. The black-and-gold clock always struck wrong, but it was all right when you knew what it meant. It was like a person talking a foreign language. If you know the language it is just as easy to understand as English. And Anthea knew the clock language. She was very sleepy, but she jumped out of bed and put her face and hands into a basin of cold water. This is a fairy charm that prevents your wanting to get back into bed again. Then she dressed, and folded up her night-gown. She did not tumble it together by the sleeves, but folded it by the seams from the hem, and that will show you the kind of well-brought-up little girl she was.
Then she took her shoes in her hand and crept softly down the stairs. She opened the dining-room window and climbed out. It would have been just as easy to go out by the door, but the window was more romantic, and less likely to be noticed by Martha.
“I will always get up at five,” she said to herself. “It was quite too awfully pretty for anything.”
Her heart was beating very fast, for she was carrying out a plan quite her own. She could not be sure that it was a good plan, but she was quite sure that it would not be any better if she were to tell the others about it. And she had a feeling that, right or wrong, she would rather go through with it alone. She put on her shoes under the iron veranda, on the red-and-yellow shining tiles, and then she ran straight to the sand-pit, and found the Psammead’s place, and dug it out; it was very cross indeed.
“It’s too bad,” it said, fluffing up its fur like pigeons do their feathers at Christmas time. “The weather’s arctic, and it’s the middle of the night.”
“Thank you,” it said, “that’s better. What’s the wish this morning?”
“I’m so sorry,” said Anthea gently, and she took off her white pinafore and covered the Sand-fairy up with it, all but its head, its bat’s ears, and its eyes that were like a snail’s eyes.
“Thank you,” it said, “that’s better. What’s the wish this morning?”
“I don’t know,” said she; “that’s just it. You see we’ve been very unlucky, so far. I wanted to talk to you about it. But—would you mind not giving me any wishes till after breakfast? It’s so hard to talk to anyone if they jump out at you with wishes you don’t really want!”
“You shouldn’t say you wish for things if you don’t wish for them. In the old days people almost always knew whether it was Megatherium or Ichthyosaurus they really wanted for dinner.”
“I’ll try not,” said Anthea, “but I do wish—”
“Look out!” said the Psammead in a warning voice, and it began to blow itself out.
“Oh, this isn’t a magic wish—it’s just—I should be so glad if you’d not swell yourself out and nearly burst to give me anything just now. Wait till the others are here.”
“Well, well,” it said indulgently, but it shivered.
“Would you,” asked Anthea kindly—“would you like to come and sit on my lap? You’d be warmer, and I could turn the skirt of my frock up round you. I’d be very careful.”
Anthea had never expected that it would, but it did.
“Thank you,” it said; “you really are rather thoughtful.” It crept on to her lap and snuggled down, and she put her arms round it with a rather frightened gentleness. “Now then!” it said.
“Well then,” said Anthea, “everything we have wished has turned out rather horrid. I wish you would advise us. You are so old, you must be very wise.”
“I was always generous from a child,” said the Sand-fairy. “I’ve spent the whole of my waking hours in giving. But one thing I won’t give—that’s advice.”
ТЕЛЕГРАМКанал с обзорами, анонсами новинок и книжными подборками
Книжный Вестник
Бот для удобного поиска и скачивания книг
Книжный Бот
Свежие любовные романы в удобных форматах
Любовные романы
О психологии, саморазвитии и личностном росте
Саморазвитие
Детективы и триллеры, все новинки
Детективы
Фантастика и фэнтези, все новинки
Фантастика
ВКОНТАКТЕ