by E. Nesbit
When the hole reached to about halfway between the top of the arch and the tower, Robert and Cyril let themselves down cautiously on the inside, and lit matches. How thankful they felt then that they had a sensible father, who did not forbid them to carry matches, as some boys’ fathers do. The father of Robert and Cyril only insisted on the matches being of the kind that strike only on the box.
“It’s not a door, it’s a sort of tunnel,” Robert cried to the girls, after the first match had flared up, flickered, and gone out. “Stand off—we’ll push some more stones down!”
They did, amid deep excitement. And now the stone heap was almost gone—and before them the girls saw the dark archway leading to unknown things. All doubts and fears as to getting home were forgotten in this thrilling moment. It was like Monte Cristo—it was like—
“I say,” cried Anthea, suddenly, “come out! There’s always bad air in places that have been shut up. It makes your torches go out, and then you die. It’s called fire-damp, I believe. Come out, I tell you.”
The urgency of her tone actually brought the boys out—and then every one took up its jacket and fanned the dark arch with it, so as to make the air fresh inside. When Anthea thought the air inside “must be freshened by now,” Cyril led the way into the arch.
The girls followed, and Robert came last, because Jane refused to tail the procession lest “something” should come in after her, and catch at her from behind. Cyril advanced cautiously, lighting match after match, and peering before him.
“It’s a vaulting roof,” he said, “and it’s all stone—all right, Panther, don’t keep pulling at my jacket! The air must be all right because of the matches, silly, and there are—look out—there are steps down.”
“Oh, don’t let’s go any farther,” said Jane, in an agony of reluctance (a very painful thing, by the way, to be in). “I’m sure there are snakes, or dens of lions, or something. Do let’s go back, and come some other time, with candles, and bellows for the fire-damp.”
“Let me get in front of you, then,” said the stern voice of Robert, from behind. “This is exactly the place for buried treasure, and I’m going on, anyway; you can stay behind if you like.”
And then, of course, Jane consented to go on.
So, very slowly and carefully, the children went down the steps—there were seventeen of them—and at the bottom of the steps were more passages branching four ways, and a sort of low arch on the right-hand side made Cyril wonder what it could be, for it was too low to be the beginning of another passage.
So he knelt down and lit a match, and stooping very low he peeped in.
“There’s something,” he said, and reached out his hand. It touched something that felt more like a damp bag of marbles than anything else that Cyril had ever touched.
“I believe it is a buried treasure,” he cried.
And it was; for even as Anthea cried, “Oh, hurry up, Squirrel—fetch it out!” Cyril pulled out a rotting canvas bag—about as big as the paper ones the greengrocer gives you with Barcelona nuts in for sixpence.
“There’s more of it, a lot more,” he said.
As he pulled the rotten bag gave way, and the gold coins ran and span and jumped and bumped and chinked and clinked on the floor of the dark passage.
I wonder what you would say if you suddenly came upon a buried treasure? What Cyril said was, “Oh, bother—I’ve burnt my fingers!” and as he spoke he dropped the match. “And it was the last!” he added.
There was a moment of desperate silence. Then Jane began to cry.
“Don’t,” said Anthea, “don’t, Pussy—you’ll exhaust the air if you cry. We can get out all right.”
“Yes,” said Jane, through her sobs, “and find the Phoenix has come back and gone away again—because it thought we’d gone home some other way, and—Oh, I wish we hadn’t come.”
Every one stood quite still—only Anthea cuddled Jane up to her and tried to wipe her eyes in the dark.
“D-don’t,” said Jane; “that’s my ear—I’m not crying with my ears.”
“Come, let’s get on out,” said Robert; but that was not so easy, for no one could remember exactly which way they had come. It is very difficult to remember things in the dark, unless you have matches with you, and then of course it is quite different, even if you don’t strike one.
Every one had come to agree with Jane’s constant wish—and despair was making the darkness blacker than ever, when quite suddenly the floor seemed to tip up—and a strong sensation of being in a whirling lift came upon every one. All eyes were closed—one’s eyes always are in the dark, don’t you think? When the whirling feeling stopped, Cyril said “Earthquakes!” and they all opened their eyes.
They were in their own dingy breakfast-room at home, and oh, how light and bright and safe and pleasant and altogether delightful it seemed after that dark underground tunnel! The carpet lay on the floor, looking as calm as though it had never been for an excursion in its life. On the mantelpiece stood the Phoenix, waiting with an air of modest yet sterling worth for the thanks of the children.
“But how did you do it?” they asked, when every one had thanked the Phoenix again and again.
“Oh, I just went and got a wish from your friend the Psammead.”
“But how did you know where to find it?”
“I found that out from the carpet; these wishing creatures always know all about each other—they’re so clannish; like the Scots, you know—all related.”
“But, the carpet can’t talk, can it?”
“No.”
“Then how—”
“How did I get the Psammead’s address? I tell you I got it from the carpet.”
“Did it speak then?”
“No,” said the Phoenix, thoughtfully, “it didn’t speak, but I gathered my information from something in its manner. I was always a singularly observant bird.”
It was not till after the cold mutton and the jam tart, as well as the tea and bread-and-butter, that any one found time to regret the golden treasure which had been left scattered on the floor of the underground passage, and which, indeed, no one had thought of till now, since the moment when Cyril burnt his fingers at the flame of the last match.
“What owls and goats we were!” said Robert. “Look how we’ve always wanted treasure—and now—”
“Never mind,” said Anthea, trying as usual to make the best of it. “We’ll go back again and get it all, and then we’ll give everybody presents.”
More than a quarter of an hour passed most agreeably in arranging what presents should be given to whom, and, when the claims of generosity had been satisfied, the talk ran for fifty minutes on what they would buy for themselves.
It was Cyril who broke in on Robert’s almost too technical account of the motor-car on which he meant to go to and from school—
“There!” he said. “Dry up. It’s no good. We can’t ever go back. We don’t know where it is.”
“Don’t you know?” Jane asked the Phoenix, wistfully.
“Not in the least,” the Phoenix replied, in a tone of amiable regret.
“Then we’ve lost the treasure,” said Cyril. And they had.
“But we’ve got the carpet and the Phoenix,” said Anthea.
“Excuse me,” said the bird, with an air of wounded dignity, “I do so hate to seem to interfere, but surely you must mean the Phoenix and the carpet?”
CHAPTER 3
THE QUEEN COOK
It was on a Saturday that the children made their first glorious journey on the wishing carpet. Unless you are too young to read at all, you will know that the next day must have been Sunday.
Sunday at 18, Camden Terrace, Camden Town, was always a very pretty day. Father always brought home flowers on Saturday, so that the breakfast-
table was extra beautiful. In November, of course, the flowers were chrysanthemums, yellow and coppery coloured. Then there were always sausages on toast for breakfast, and these are rapture, after six days of Kentish Town Road eggs at fourteen a shilling.
On this particular Sunday there were fowls for dinner, a kind of food that is generally kept for birthdays and grand occasions, and there was an angel pudding, when rice and milk and oranges and white icing do their best to make you happy.
After dinner father was very sleepy indeed, because he had been working hard all the week; but he did not yield to the voice that said, “Go and have an hour’s rest.” He nursed the Lamb, who had a horrid cough that cook said was whooping-cough as sure as eggs, and he said—
“Come along, kiddies; I’ve got a ripping book from the library, called The Golden Age, and I’ll read it to you.”
Mother settled herself on the drawing-room sofa, and said she could listen quite nicely with her eyes shut. The Lamb snuggled into the “armchair corner” of daddy’s arm, and the others got into a happy heap on the hearth-rug. At first, of course, there were too many feet and knees and shoulders and elbows, but real comfort was actually settling down on them, and the Phoenix and the carpet were put away on the back top shelf of their minds (beautiful things that could be taken out and played with later), when a surly solid knock came at the drawing-room door. It opened an angry inch, and the cook’s voice said, “Please, m’, may I speak to you a moment?”
Mother looked at father with a desperate expression. Then she put her pretty sparkly Sunday shoes down from the sofa, and stood up in them and sighed.
“As good fish in the sea,” said father, cheerfully, and it was not till much later that the children understood what he meant.
Mother went out into the passage, which is called “the hall,” where the umbrella-stand is, and the picture of the “Monarch of the Glen” in a yellow shining frame, with brown spots on the Monarch from the damp in the house before last, and there was cook, very red and damp in the face, and with a clean apron tied on all crooked over the dirty one that she had dished up those dear delightful chickens in. She stood there and she seemed to get redder and damper, and she twisted the corner of her apron round her fingers, and she said very shortly and fiercely—
“If you please ma’am, I should wish to leave at my day month.” Mother leaned against the hat-stand. The children could see her looking pale through the crack of the door, because she had been very kind to the cook, and had given her a holiday only the day before, and it seemed so very unkind of the cook to want to go like this, and on a Sunday too.
“Why, what’s the matter?” mother said.
“It’s them children,” the cook replied, and somehow the children all felt that they had known it from the first. They did not remember having done anything extra wrong, but it is so frightfully easy to displease a cook. “It’s them children: there’s that there new carpet in their room, covered thick with mud, both sides, beastly yellow mud, and sakes alive knows where they got it. And all that muck to clean up on a Sunday! It’s not my place, and it’s not my intentions, so I don’t deceive you, ma’am, and but for them limbs, which they is if ever there was, it’s not a bad place, though I says it, and I wouldn’t wish to leave, but—”
“I’m very sorry,” said mother, gently. “I will speak to the children. And you had better think it over, and if you really wish to go, tell me tomorrow.”
Next day mother had a quiet talk with cook, and cook said she didn’t mind if she stayed on a bit, just to see.
But meantime the question of the muddy carpet had been gone into thoroughly by father and mother. Jane’s candid explanation that the mud had come from the bottom of a foreign tower where there was buried treasure was received with such chilling disbelief that the others limited their defence to an expression of sorrow, and of a determination “not to do it again.” But father said (and mother agreed with him, because mothers have to agree with fathers, and not because it was her own idea) that children who coated a carpet on both sides with thick mud, and when they were asked for an explanation could only talk silly nonsense—that meant Jane’s truthful statement—were not fit to have a carpet at all, and, indeed, shouldn’t have one for a week!
So the carpet was brushed (with tea-leaves, too) which was the only comfort Anthea could think of, and folded up and put away in the cupboard at the top of the stairs, and daddy put the key in his trousers pocket. “Till Saturday,” said he.
“Never mind,” said Anthea, “we’ve got the Phoenix.”
But, as it happened, they hadn’t. The Phoenix was nowhere to be found, and everything had suddenly settled down from the rosy wild beauty of magic happenings to the common damp brownness of ordinary November life in Camden Town—and there was the nursery floor all bare boards in the middle and brown oilcloth round the outside, and the bareness and yellowness of the middle floor showed up the blackbeetles with terrible distinctness, when the poor things came out in the evening, as usual, to try to make friends with the children. But the children never would.
The Sunday ended in gloom, which even junket for supper in the blue Dresden bowl could hardly lighten at all. Next day the Lamb’s cough was worse. It certainly seemed very whoopy, and the doctor came in his brougham carriage.
Every one tried to bear up under the weight of the sorrow which it was to know that the wishing carpet was locked up and the Phoenix mislaid. A good deal of time was spent in looking for the Phoenix.
“It’s a bird of its word,” said Anthea. “I’m sure it’s not deserted us. But you know it had a most awfully long fly from wherever it was to near Rochester and back, and I expect the poor thing’s feeling tired out and wants rest. I am sure we may trust it.”
The others tried to feel sure of this, too, but it was hard.
No one could be expected to feel very kindly towards the cook, since it was entirely through her making such a fuss about a little foreign mud that the carpet had been taken away.
“She might have told us,” said Jane, “and Panther and I would have cleaned it with tea-leaves.”
“She’s a cantankerous cat,” said Robert.
“I shan’t say what I think about her,” said Anthea, primly, “because it would be evil speaking, lying, and slandering.”
“It’s not lying to say she’s a disagreeable pig, and a beastly blue-nosed Bozwoz,” said Cyril, who had read The Eyes of Light, and intended to talk like Tony as soon as he could teach Robert to talk like Paul.
And all the children, even Anthea, agreed that even if she wasn’t a blue-nosed Bozwoz, they wished cook had never been born.
But I ask you to believe that they didn’t do all the things on purpose which so annoyed the cook during the following week, though I daresay the things would not have happened if the cook had been a favourite. This is a mystery. Explain it if you can. The things that had happened were as follows:
Sunday.—Discovery of foreign mud on both sides of the carpet.
Monday.—Liquorice put on to boil with aniseed balls in a saucepan. Anthea did this, because she thought it would be good for the Lamb’s cough. The whole thing forgotten, and bottom of saucepan burned out. It was the little saucepan lined with white that was kept for the baby’s milk.
Tuesday.—A dead mouse found in pantry. Fish-slice taken to dig grave with. By regrettable accident fish-slice broken. Defence: “The cook oughtn’t to keep dead mice in pantries.”
Wednesday.—Chopped suet left on kitchen table. Robert added chopped soap, but he says he thought the suet was soap too.
Thursday.—Broke the kitchen window by falling against it during a perfectly fair game of bandits in the area.
Friday.—Stopped up grating of kitchen sink with putty and filled sink with water to make a lake to sail paper boats in. Went away and left the tap running. Kitchen hearthrug a
nd cook’s shoes ruined.
On Saturday the carpet was restored. There had been plenty of time during the week to decide where it should be asked to go when they did get it back.
Mother had gone over to granny’s, and had not taken the Lamb because he had a bad cough, which, cook repeatedly said, was whooping-cough as sure as eggs is eggs.
“But we’ll take him out, a ducky darling,” said Anthea. “We’ll take him somewhere where you can’t have whooping-cough. Don’t be so silly, Robert. If he does talk about it no one’ll take any notice. He’s always talking about things he’s never seen.”
So they dressed the Lamb and themselves in out-of-doors clothes, and the Lamb chuckled and coughed, and laughed and coughed again, poor dear, and all the chairs and tables were moved off the carpet by the boys, while Jane nursed the Lamb, and Anthea rushed through the house in one last wild hunt for the missing Phoenix.
“It’s no use waiting for it,” she said, reappearing breathless in the breakfast-room. “But I know it hasn’t deserted us. It’s a bird of its word.”
“Quite so,” said the gentle voice of the Phoenix from beneath the table.
Every one fell on its knees and looked up, and there was the Phoenix perched on a crossbar of wood that ran across under the table, and had once supported a drawer, in the happy days before the drawer had been used as a boat, and its bottom unfortunately trodden out by Raggett’s Really Reliable School Boots on the feet of Robert.
“I’ve been here all the time,” said the Phoenix, yawning politely behind its claw. “If you wanted me you should have recited the ode of invocation; it’s seven thousand lines long, and written in very pure and beautiful Greek.”
“Couldn’t you tell it us in English?” asked Anthea.