by E. Nesbit
‘What is your heart’s desire?’ Anthea asked.
‘Great and deep learning,’ said the Priest, without a moment’s hesitation. ‘A learning greater and deeper than that of any man of my land and my time. But learning too great is useless. If I go back to my own land and my own age, who will believe my tales of what I have seen in the future? Let me stay here, be the great knower of all that has been, in that our time, so living to me, so old to you, about which your learned men speculate unceasingly, and often, he tells me, vainly.’
‘If I were you,’ said the Psammead, ‘I should ask the Amulet about that. It’s a dangerous thing, trying to live in a time that’s not your own. You can’t breathe an air that’s thousands of centuries ahead of your lungs without feeling the effects of it, sooner or later. Prepare the mystic circle and consult the Amulet.’
‘Oh, what a dream!’ cried the learned gentleman. ‘Dear children, if you love me—and I think you do, in dreams and out of them—prepare the mystic circle and consult the Amulet!’
They did. As once before, when the sun had shone in August splendour, they crouched in a circle on the floor. Now the air outside was thick and yellow with the fog that by some strange decree always attends the Cattle Show week. And in the street costers were shouting. ‘Ur Hekau Setcheh,’ Jane said the Name of Power. And instantly the light went out, and all the sounds went out too, so that there was a silence and a darkness, both deeper than any darkness or silence that you have ever even dreamed of imagining. It was like being deaf or blind, only darker and quieter even than that.
Then out of that vast darkness and silence came a light and a voice. The light was too faint to see anything by, and the voice was too small for you to hear what it said. But the light and the voice grew. And the light was the light that no man may look on and live, and the voice was the sweetest and most terrible voice in the world. The children cast down their eyes. And so did everyone.
‘I speak,’ said the voice. ‘What is it that you would hear?’
There was a pause. Everyone was afraid to speak.
‘What are we to do about Rekh-mara?’ said Robert suddenly and abruptly. ‘Shall he go back through the Amulet to his own time, or—’
‘No one can pass through the Amulet now,’ said the beautiful, terrible voice, ‘to any land or any time. Only when it was imperfect could such things be. But men may pass through the perfect charm to the perfect union, which is not of time or space.’
‘Would you be so very kind,’ said Anthea tremulously, ‘as to speak so that we can understand you? The Psammead said something about Rekh-mara not being able to live here, and if he can’t get back—’ She stopped, her heart was beating desperately in her throat, as it seemed.
‘Nobody can continue to live in a land and in a time not appointed,’ said the voice of glorious sweetness. ‘But a soul may live, if in that other time and land there be found a soul so akin to it as to offer it refuge, in the body of that land and time, that thus they two may be one soul in one body.’
The children exchanged discouraged glances. But the eyes of Rekh-mara and the learned gentleman met, and were kind to each other, and promised each other many things, secret and sacred and very beautiful.
Anthea saw the look. ‘Oh, but,’ she said, without at all meaning to say it, ‘dear Jimmy’s soul isn’t at all like Rekh-mara’s. I’m certain it isn’t. I don’t want to be rude, but it isn’t, you know. Dear Jimmy’s soul is as good as gold, and—’
‘Nothing that is not good can pass beneath the double arch of my perfect Amulet,’ said the voice. ‘If both are willing, say the word of Power, and let the two souls become one for ever and ever more.’
‘Shall I?’ asked Jane.
‘Yes.’
‘Yes.’
The voices were those of the Egyptian Priest and the learned gentleman, and the voices were eager, alive, thrilled with hope and the desire of great things.
So Jane took the Amulet from Robert and held it up between the two men, and said, for the last time, the word of Power.
‘Ur Hekau Setcheh.’
The perfect Amulet grew into a double arch; the two arches leaned to each other making a great A.
‘A stands for Amen,’ whispered Jane; ‘what he was a priest of.’
‘Hush!’ breathed Anthea.
The great double arch glowed in and through the green light that had been there since the Name of Power had first been spoken—it glowed with a light more bright yet more soft than the other light—a glory and splendour and sweetness unspeakable. ‘Come!’ cried Rekh-mara, holding out his hands.
‘Come!’ cried the learned gentleman, and he also held out his hands.
Each moved forward under the glowing, glorious arch of the perfect Amulet.
Then Rekh-mara quavered and shook, and as steel is drawn to a magnet he was drawn, under the arch of magic, nearer and nearer to the learned gentleman. And, as one drop of water mingles with another, when the window-glass is rain-wrinkled, as one quick-silver bead is drawn to another quick-silver bead, Rekh-mara, Divine Father of the Temple of Amen-Ra, was drawn into, slipped into, disappeared into, and was one with Jimmy, the good, the beloved, the learned gentleman.
And suddenly it was good daylight and the December sun shone. The fog has passed away like a dream.
The Amulet was there—little and complete in Jane’s hand, and there were the other children and the Psammead, and the learned gentleman. But Rekh-mara—or the body of Rekh-mara—was not there any more. As for his soul…
‘Oh, the horrid thing!’ cried Robert, and put his foot on a centipede as long as your finger, that crawled and wriggled and squirmed at the learned gentleman’s feet.
‘That,’ said the Psammead, ‘Was the evil in the soul of Rekh-mara.’
There was a deep silence.
‘Then Rekh-mara’s him now?’ said Jane at last.
‘All that was good in Rekh-mara,’ said the Psammead.
‘He ought to have his heart’s desire, too,’ said Anthea, in a sort of stubborn gentleness.
‘His heart’s desire,’ said the Psammead, ‘is the perfect Amulet you hold in your hand. Yes—and has been ever since he first saw the broken half of it.’
‘We’ve got ours,’ said Anthea softly.
‘Yes,’ said the Psammead—its voice was crosser than they had ever heard it—‘your parents are coming home. And what’s to become of me? I shall be found out, and made a show of, and degraded in every possible way. I know they’ll make me go into Parliament—hateful place—all mud and no sand. That beautiful Baalbec temple in the desert! Plenty of good sand there, and no politics! I wish I were there, safe in the Past—that I do.’
‘I wish you were,’ said the learned gentleman absently, yet polite as ever.
The Psammead swelled itself up, turned its long snail’s eyes in one last lingering look at Anthea—a loving look, she always said, and thought—and—vanished.
‘Well,’ said Anthea, after a silence, ‘I suppose it’s happy. The only thing it ever did really care for was sand.’
‘My dear children,’ said the learned gentleman, ‘I must have fallen asleep. I’ve had the most extraordinary dream.’
‘I hope it was a nice one,’ said Cyril with courtesy.
‘Yes.… I feel a new man after it. Absolutely a new man.’
There was a ring at the front-door bell. The opening of a door. Voices.
‘It’s them!’ cried Robert, and a thrill ran through four hearts.
‘Here!’ cried Anthea, snatching the Amulet from Jane and pressing it into the hand of the learned gentleman. ‘Here—it’s yours—your very own—a present from us, because you’re Rekh-mara as well as… I mean, because you’re such a dear.’
She hugged him briefly but fervently, and the fo
ur swept down the stairs to the hall, where a cabman was bringing in boxes, and where, heavily disguised in travelling cloaks and wraps, was their hearts’ desire—three-fold—Mother, Father, and The Lamb.
‘Bless me!’ said the learned gentleman, left alone, ‘bless me! What a treasure! The dear children! It must be their affection that has given me these luminous apercus. I seem to see so many things now—things I never saw before! The dear children! The dear, dear children!’
THE MARBLE CHILD
All over the pavement of the church spread the exaggerated cross-hatching of the old pews’ oak, a Smithfield market of intersecting lines such as children made with cards in the old days when kings and knaves had fat legs bulging above their serviceable feet, and queens had skirts to their gowns and were not cut across their royal middles by mirrors reflecting only the bedizened torso of them and the charge—heart, trefoil, or the like—in the right-hand top corner of the oblong that framed them.
The pew had qualities: tall fat hassocks, red cushions, a comparative seclusion, and, in the case of the affluent, red curtains drawn at sermon-time.
The child wearied by the spectacle of a plump divine, in black gown and Geneva bands, thumping the pulpit-cushions in the madness of incomprehensible oratory, surrendered his ears to the noise of intonations which, in his own treble, would have earned the reprimand, “Naughty temper.” His eyes, however, were, through some oversight of the gods of his universe, still his own. They found their own pasture: not, to be sure, the argent and sable of gown and bands, still less the gules of flushed denunciatory gills.
There is fair pasture in an old church which, when Norman work was broken down, men loved and built again as from the heart, with pillars and arches, which, to their rude time, symbolized all that the heart desires to materialize, in symbolic stone. The fretted tombs where the effigies of warrior and priest lay life-like in dead marble, the fretted canopies that brooded above their rest. Tall pillars like the trunks of the pine woods that smelt so sweet, the marvel of the timbered roof—turned upside down it would be like a ship. And what could be easier than to turn it upside down? Imagination shrank bashfully from the pulpit already tightly tenanted, but the triforium was plainly and beautifully empty; there one could walk, squeezing happily through the deep thin arches and treading carefully by the unguarded narrow ledge. Only if one played too long in the roof aunts nudged, and urgent whispers insisted that one must not look about like that in church. When this moment came it came always as a crisis foreseen, half dreaded, half longed-for. After that the child kept his eyes lowered, and looked only at the faded red hassocks from which the straw bulged, and in brief, guarded, intimate moments, at the other child.
The other child was kneeling, always, whether the congregation knelt or stood or sat. Its hands were clasped. Its face was raised, but its back bowed under a weight—the weight of the font, for the other child was of marble and knelt always in the church, Sundays and week-days. There had been once three marble figures holding up the shallow basin, but two had crumbled or been broken away, and now it seemed that the whole weight of the superimposed marble rested on those slender shoulders.
The child who was not marble was sorry for the other. He must be very tired.
The child who was not marble,—his name was Ernest,—that child of weary eyes and bored brain, pitied the marble boy while he envied him.
“I suppose he doesn’t really feel, if he’s stone,” he said. “That’s what they mean by the stony-hearted tyrant. But if he does feel— How jolly it would be if he could come out and sit in my pew, or if I could creep under the font beside him. If he would move a little there would be just room for me.”
The first time that Ernest ever saw the marble child move was on the hottest Sunday in the year. The walk across the fields had been a breathless penance, the ground burned the soles of Ernest’s feet as red-hot ploughshares the feet of the saints. The corn was cut, and stood in stiff yellow stooks, and the shadows were very black. The sky was light, except in the west beyond the pine trees, where blue-black clouds were piled.
“Like witches’ feather-beds,” said Aunt Harriet, shaking out the folds of her lace shawl.
“Not before the child, dear,” whispered Aunt Emmeline.
Ernest heard her, of course. It was always like that: as soon as any one spoke about anything interesting, Aunt Emmeline intervened. Ernest walked along very melancholy in his starched frill. The dust had whitened his strapped shoes, and there was a wrinkle in one of his white socks.
“Pull it up, child, pull it up,” said Aunt Jessie; and shielded from the world by the vast silk-veiled crinolines of three full-sized aunts, he pulled it up.
On the way to church, and indeed, in all walks abroad, you held the hand of an aunt; the circumferent crinolines made the holding an arm’s-length business, very tiring. Ernest was always glad when, in the porch, the hand was dropped. It was just as the porch was reached that the first lonely roll of thunder broke over the hills.
“I knew it,” said Aunt Jessie, in triumph; “but you would wear your blue silk.”
There was no more thunder till after the second lesson, which was hardly ever as interesting as the first, Ernest thought. The marble child looked more tired than usual, and Ernest lost himself in a dream-game where both of them got out from prison and played hide-and-seek among the tombstones. Then the thunder cracked deafeningly right over the church. Ernest forgot to stand up, and even the clergyman waited till it died away.
It was a most exciting service, well worth coming to church for, and afterwards people crowded in the wide porch and wondered whether it would clear, and wished they had brought their umbrellas. Some went back and sat in their pews till the servants should have had time to go home and return with umbrellas and cloaks. The more impetuous made clumsy rushes between the showers, bonnets bent, skirts held well up. Many a Sunday dress was ruined that day, many a bonnet fell from best to second-best.
And it was when Aunt Jessie whispered to him to sit still and be a good boy and learn a hymn, that he looked to the marble child with, “Isn’t it a shame?” in his heart and his eyes, and the marble child looked back, “Never mind, it will soon be over,” and held out its marble hands. Ernest saw them come toward him, reaching well beyond the rim of the basin under which they had always, till now, stayed.
“Oh!” said Ernest, quite out loud; and, dropping the hymn-book, held out his hands, or began to hold them out. For before he had done more than sketch the gesture, he remembered that marble does not move and that one must not be silly. All the same, marble had moved. Also Ernest had “spoken out loud” in church. Unspeakable disgrace!
He was taken home in conscious ignominy, treading in all the puddles to distract his mind from his condition.
He was put to bed early, as a punishment, instead of sitting up and learning his catechism under the charge of one of the maids while the aunts went to evening church. This, while it was terrible to Ernest, was in the nature of a reprieve to the housemaid, who found means to modify her own consequent loneliness. Far-away whispers and laughs from the back or kitchen windows assured Ernest that the front or polite side of the house was unguarded. He got up, simulated the appearance of the completely dressed, and went down the carpeted stairs, through the rosewood-furnished drawing-room, rose-scented and still as a deathbed, and so out through the French windows to the lawn, where already the beginnings of dew lay softly.
His going out had no definite aim. It was simply an act of rebellion such as, secure from observation, the timid may achieve; a demonstration akin to putting the tongue out behind people’s backs.
Having got himself out on the lawn, he made haste to hide in the shrubbery, disheartened by a baffling consciousness of the futility of safe revenges. What is the tongue put out behind the back of the enemy without the applause of some admirer?
The red rays of
the setting sun made splendor in the dripping shrubbery.
“I wish I hadn’t,” said Ernest.
But it seemed silly to go back now, just to go out and to go back. So he went farther into the shrubbery and got out at the other side where the shrubbery slopes down into the wood, and it was nearly dark there—so nearly that the child felt more alone than ever.
And then quite suddenly he was not alone. Hands parted the hazels and a face he knew looked out from between them.
He knew the face, and yet the child he saw was not any of the children he knew.
“Well,” said the child with the face he knew; “I’ve been watching you. What did you come out for?”
“I was put to bed.”
“Do you not like it?”
“Not when it’s for punishment.”
“If you’ll go back now,” said the strange child, “I’ll come and play with you after you’re asleep.”
“You daren’t. Suppose the aunts catch you?”
“They won’t,” said the child, shaking its head and laughing. “I’ll race you to the house!”
Ernest ran. He won the race. For the other child was not there at all when he reached the house.
“How odd!” he said. But he was tired and there was thunder again and it was beginning to rain, large spots as big as pennies on the step of the French window. So he went back to bed, too sleepy to worry about the question of where he had seen the child before, and only a little disappointed because his revenge had been so brief and inadequate.
Then he fell asleep and dreamed that the marble child had crept out from under the font, and that he and it were playing hide-and-seek among the pews in the gallery at church. It was a delightful dream and lasted all night, and when he woke he knew that the child he had seen in the wood in yesterday’s last light was the marble child from the church.