For the sake of saying something to express my interest I said, “This furniture is fairly solid; but, of course, people do treat it much too carelessly.”
As I looked up doubtfully my eye caught his, and was fixed as his was fixed, in an apocalyptic stare. I had thought him ordinary as he entered, save for his strange, cautious manner; but if the other people had seen him they would have screamed and emptied the room. They did not see him, and they went on making a clatter with their forks, and a murmur with their conversation.
But the man’s face was the face of a maniac.
“Did you mean anything particular by that remark?” he asked at last, and the blood crawled back slowly into his face.
“Nothing whatever,” I answered. “One does not mean anything here; it spoils people’s digestion.”
He leaned back and wiped his broad forehead with a big handkerchief; and yet there seemed to be a sort of regret in his relief. “I thought perhaps,” he said in a low voice, “that another of them had gone wrong.”
“If you mean another digestion gone wrong,” I said, “I never heard of one here that went right.
This is the heart of the Empire, and the other organs are in an equally bad way.”
“No, I mean another street gone wrong,” and he said heavily and quietly, “but as I suppose that doesn’t explain much to you, I think I shall have to tell you the story. I do so with all the less responsibility, because I know you won’t believe it. For forty years of my life I invariably left my office, which is in Leadenhall Street, at half-past five in the afternoon, taking with me an umbrella in the right hand and a bag in the left hand. For forty years two months and four days I passed out of the side door, walked down the street on the left-hand side, took the first turning to the left and the third to the right, from where I bought an evening paper, followed the road on the right-hand side round two obtuse angles, and came out just outside a Metropolitan Station, where I took a train home. For forty years two months and four days I fulfilled this course by accumulated habit: it was not a long street that I traversed, and it took me about four and a half minutes to do it. After forty years two months and four days, on the fifth day I went out in the same manner, with my umbrella in the right hand and my bag in the left, and I began to notice that walking along the familiar street tired me somewhat more than usual. At first I thought I must be breathless and out of condition; though this, again, seemed unnatural, as my habits had always been like clockwork. But after a little while I became convinced that the road was distinctly on a more steep incline than I had known previously; I was positively panting uphill.
“Owing to this no doubt the corner of the street seemed farther off than usual; and when I turned it I was convinced that I had turned down the wrong one. For now the street shot up quite a steep slant, such as one only sees in the hilly parts of London, and in this part there were no hills at all.
“Yet it was not the wrong street. The name written on it was the same; the shuttered shops were the same; the lampposts and the whole look of the perspective was the same; only it was tilted upward like a lid. Forgetting any trouble about breathlessness or fatigue I ran furiously forward, and reached the second of my accustomed turnings, which ought to bring me almost within sight of the station. And as I turned that corner I nearly fell on the pavement. For now the street went up straight in front of my face like a steep staircase or the side of a pyramid. There was not for miles around that place so much as a slope like that of Ludgate Hill. And this was a slope like that of the Matterhorn. The whole street had lifted itself like a single wave, and yet every speck and detail of it was the same, and I saw in the high distance, as at the top of an Alpine pass, picked out in pink letters, the name over my paper shop.
“I ran on and on blindly now, passing all the shops, and coming to a part of the road where there was a long grey row of private houses. I had, I know not why, an irrational feeling that I was on a long iron bridge in empty space. An impulse seized me, and I pulled up the iron trap of a coal-hole. Looking down through it I saw empty space and the stars. When I looked up again a man was standing in his front garden, having apparently come out of his house; he was leaning over the railings and gazing at me. We were all alone on that nightmare road; his face was in shadow; his dress was dark and ordinary; but when I saw him standing so perfectly still I knew somehow that be was not of this world. And the stars behind his head were larger and fiercer than ought to be endured by the eyes of men.
“ ‘If you are a kind angel,’ I said, ‘or a wise devil, or have anything in common with mankind, tell me what is this street possessed of devils.’
“After a long silence he said, ‘What do you say it is?’
“ ‘It is Bumpton Street, of course,’ I snapped. ‘It goes to Oldgate Station.’
“ ‘Yes,’ he admitted gravely, ‘it goes there sometimes. Just now, however, it is going to heaven.’
“ ‘To heaven?’ I said. ‘Why?’
“ ‘It is going to heaven for justice,’ he replied. ‘You must have treated it badly. Remember always there is one thing that cannot be endured by anybody or anything. That one unendurable thing is to be overworked and also neglected. For instance, you can overwork women—everybody does. But you can’t neglect women—I defy you to. At the same time, you can neglect tramps and gipsies and all the apparent refuse of the State, so long as you do not overwork them.
“ ‘But no beast of the field, no horse, no dog can endure long to be asked to do more than his work and yet have less than his honour.
“ ‘It is the same with streets. You have worked this street to death, and yet you have never remembered its existence. If you had owned a healthy democracy, even of pagans, they would have hung this street with garlands and given it the name of a god. Then it would have gone quietly. But at last the street has grown tired of your tireless insolence; and it is bucking and rearing its head to heaven. Have you never sat on a bucking horse?’
“I looked at the long gray street, and for a moment it seemed to me to be exactly like the long gray neck of a horse flung up to heaven. But in a moment my sanity returned, and I said, ‘But this is all nonsense. Streets go to the place they have to go to. A street must always go to its end.’
“ ‘Why do you think so of a street?’ he asked, standing very still.
“ ‘Because I have always seen it do the same thing,’ I replied, in reasonable anger. ‘Day after day, year after year, it has always gone to Oldgate Station; day after…’
“I stopped, for he had flung up his head with the fury of the road in revolt.
“ ‘And you?’ he cried terribly. ‘What do you think the road thinks of you? Does the road think you are alive? Are you alive? Day after day, year after year, you have gone to Oldgate Station…’ Since then I have respected the things called inanimate!”
And bowing slightly to the mustard-pot, the man in the restaurant withdrew.
Edith Nesbit (1858–1924) was an English author and poet who published under the name E. Nesbit. She created worlds with a logic all their own, always with her trademark witty prose. She was also one of the founders of the Fellowship of New Life, which later became the Fabian Society, a group dedicated to creating a democratic socialist state in Great Britain. She began writing in the 1890s and published more than sixty children’s books alone. Somewhat ironically, Nesbit was not a fan of children, although they are often the protagonists of her books. It is probable that her dislike of them aided her clear and genuine portrayal of them in her novels The Wouldbegoods (1901), The Revolt of the Toys, and What Comes of Quarreling (1902). Quite possibly the inspiration for C. S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia series, “The Aunt and Amabel” involves using a wardrobe as an entrance into another world.
The Aunt and Amabel
E. Nesbit
IT IS NOT PLEASANT to be a fish out of water. To be a cat in
water is not what any one would desire. To be in a temper is uncomfortable. And no one can fully taste the joys of life if he is in a Little Lord Fauntleroy suit. But by far the most uncomfortable thing to be in is disgrace, sometimes amusingly called Coventry by the people who are not in it.
We have all been there. It is a place where the heart sinks and aches, where familiar faces are clouded and changed, where any remark that one may tremblingly make is received with stony silence or with the assurance that nobody wants to talk to such a naughty child. If you are only in disgrace, and not in solitary confinement, you will creep about a house that is like the one you have had such jolly times in, and yet as unlike it as a bad dream is to a June morning. You will long to speak to people, and be afraid to speak. You will wonder whether there is anything you can do that will change things at all. You have said you are sorry, and that has changed nothing. You will wonder whether you are to stay for ever in this desolate place, outside all hope and love and fun and happiness. And though it has happened before, and has always, in the end, come to an end, you can never be quite sure that this time it is not going to last for ever.
“It is going to last for ever,” said Amabel, who was eight. “What shall I do? Oh whatever shall I do?”
What she had done ought to have formed the subject of her meditations. And she had done what had seemed to her all the time, and in fact still seemed, a self-sacrificing and noble act. She was staying with an aunt—measles or a new baby, or the painters in the house, I forget which, the cause of her banishment. And the aunt, who was really a great-aunt and quite old enough to know better, had been grumbling about her head gardener to a lady who called in blue spectacles and a beady bonnet with violet flowers in it.
“He hardly lets me have a plant for the table,” said the aunt, “and that border in front of the breakfast-room window—it’s just bare earth—and I expressly ordered chrysanthemums to be planted there. He thinks of nothing but his greenhouse.”
The beady-violet-blue-glassed lady snorted, and said she didn’t know what we were coming to, and she would have just half a cup, please, with not quite so much milk, thank you very much.
Now what would you have done? Minded your own business most likely, and not got into trouble at all. Not so Amabel. Enthusiastically anxious to do something which should make the great-aunt see what a thoughtful, unselfish little girl she really was (the aunt’s opinion of her being at present quite otherwise), she got up very early in the morning and took the cutting-out scissors from the work-room table drawer and stole, “like an errand of mercy,” she told herself, to the greenhouse where she busily snipped off every single flower she could find. MacFarlane was at his breakfast. Then with the points of the cutting-out scissors she made nice deep little holes in the flower-bed where the chrysanthemums ought to have been, and struck the flowers in—chrysanthemums, geraniums, primulas, orchids, and carnations. It would be a lovely surprise for Auntie.
Then the aunt came down to breakfast and saw the lovely surprise. Amabel’s world turned upside down and inside out suddenly and surprisingly, and there she was, in Coventry, and not even the housemaid would speak to her. Her great-uncle, whom she passed in the hall on her way to her own room, did indeed, as he smoothed his hat, murmur, “Sent to Coventry, eh? Never mind, it’ll soon be over,” and went off to the City banging the front door behind him.
He meant well, but he did not understand.
Amabel understood, or she thought she did, and knew in her miserable heart that she was sent to Coventry for the last time, and that this time she would stay there.
“I don’t care,” she said quite untruly. “I’ll never try to be kind to anyone again.” And that wasn’t true either. She was to spend the whole day alone in the best bedroom, the one with the four-post bed and the red curtains and the large wardrobe with a looking-glass in it that you could see yourself in to the very ends of your strap-shoes.
The first thing Amabel did was to look at herself in the glass. She was still sniffing and sobbing, and her eyes were swimming in tears, another one rolled down her nose as she looked—that was very interesting. Another rolled down, and that was the last, because as soon as you get interested in watching your tears they stop.
Next she looked out of the window, and saw the decorated flower-bed, just as she had left it, very bright and beautiful.
“Well, it does look nice,” she said. “I don’t care what they say.”
Then she looked round the room for something to read; there was nothing. The old-fashioned best bedrooms never did have anything. Only on the large dressing-table, on the left-hand side of the oval swing-glass, was one book covered in red velvet, and on it, very twistily embroidered in yellow silk and mixed up with misleading leaves and squiggles were the letters, A.B.C.
“Perhaps it’s a picture alphabet,” said Mabel, and was quite pleased, though of course she was much too old to care for alphabets. Only when one is very unhappy and very dull, anything is better than nothing. She opened the book.
“Why, it’s only a time-table!” she said. “I suppose it’s for people when they want to go away, and Auntie puts it here in case they suddenly make up their minds to go, and feel that they can’t wait another minute. I feel like that, only it’s no good, and I expect other people do too.”
She had learned how to use the dictionary, and this seemed to go the same way. She looked up the names of all the places she knew.—Brighton where she had once spent a month, Rugby where her brother was at school, and Home, which was Amberley—and she saw the times when the trains left for these places, and wished she could go by those trains.
And once more she looked round the best bedroom which was her prison, and thought of the Bastille, and wished she had a toad to tame, like the poor Viscount, or a flower to watch growing, like Picciola, and she was very sorry for herself, and very angry with her aunt, and very grieved at the conduct of her parents—she had expected better things from them—and now they had left her in this dreadful place where no one loved her, and no one understood her.
There seemed to be no place for toads or flowers in the best room, it was carpeted all over even in its least noticeable corners. It had everything a best room ought to have—and everything was of dark shining mahogany. The toilet-table had a set of red and gold glass things—a tray, candlesticks, a ring-stand, many little pots with lids, and two bottles with stoppers. When the stoppers were taken out they smelt very strange, something like very old scent, and something like cold cream also very old, and something like going to the dentist’s.
I do not know whether the scent of those bottles had anything to do with what happened. It certainly was a very extraordinary scent. Quite different from any perfume that I smell nowadays, but I remember that when I was a little girl I smelt it quite often. But then there are no best rooms now such as there used to be. The best rooms now are gay with chintz and mirrors, and there are always flowers and books, and little tables to put your teacup on, and sofas, and armchairs. And they smell of varnish and new furniture.
When Amabel had sniffed at both bottles and looked in all the pots, which were quite clean and empty except for a pearl button and two pins in one of them, she took up the A.B.C. again to look for Whitby, where her godmother lived. And it was then that she saw the extraordinary name “Whereyouwantogoto.” This was odd—but the name of the station from which it started was still more extraordinary, for it was not Euston or Cannon Street or Marylebone.
The name of the station was “Bigwardrobeinspareroom.” And below this name, really quite unusual for a station, Amabel read in small letters:
“Single fares strictly forbidden. Return tickets No Class Nuppence. Trains leave Bigwardrobeinspareroom all the time.” And under that in still smaller letters—
“You had better go now.”
What would you have done? Rubbed your eyes and thought you were dreaming? Well, if you had, nothing
more would have happened. Nothing ever does when you behave like that. Amabel was wiser. She went straight to the Big Wardrobe and turned its glass handle.
“I expect it’s only shelves and people’s best hats,” she said. But she only said it. People often say what they don’t mean, so that if things turn out as they don’t expect, they can say “I told you so,” but this is most dishonest to one’s self, and being dishonest to one’s self is almost worse than being dishonest to other people. Amabel would never have done it if she had been herself. But she was out of herself with anger and unhappiness.
Of course it wasn’t hats. It was, most amazingly, a crystal cave, very oddly shaped like a railway station. It seemed to be lighted by stars, which is, of course, unusual in a booking office, and over the station clock was a full moon. The clock had no figures, only Now in shining letters all round it, twelve times, and the Nows touched, so the clock was bound to be always right. How different from the clock you go to school by!
A porter in white satin hurried forward to take Amabel’s luggage. Her luggage was the A.B.C. which she still held in her hand.
“Lots of time, Miss,” he said, grinning in a most friendly way, “I am glad you’re going. You will enjoy yourself! What a nice little girl you are!”
This was cheering. Amabel smiled.
At the pigeon-hole that tickets come out of, another person, also in white satin, was ready with a mother-of-pearl ticket, round, like a card counter.
“Here you are, Miss,” he said with the kindest smile, “price nothing, and refreshments free all the way. It’s a pleasure,” he added, “to issue a ticket to a nice little lady like you.” The train was entirely of crystal, too, and the cushions were of white satin. There were little buttons such as you have for electric bells, and on them “Whatyouwantoeat,” “Whatyouwantodrink,” “Whatyouwantoread,” in silver letters.
The Big Book of Classic Fantasy Page 85