by Edith Nesbit
‘Yes, mother?’ she said.
‘Dearest,’ said mother, ‘the Lamb—’
Anthea tried to be brave. She tried to say that the Lamb and Robert were out. Perhaps she tried too hard. Anyway, when she opened her mouth no words came. So she stood with it open. It seemed easier to keep from crying with one’s mouth in that unusual position.
‘The Lamb,’ mother went on; ‘he was very good at first, but he’s pulled the toilet-cover off the dressing-table with all the brushes and pots and things, and now he’s so quiet I’m sure he’s in some dreadful mischief. And I can’t see him from here, and if I’d got out of bed to see I’m sure I should have fainted.’
‘Do you mean he’s HERE?’ said Anthea.
‘Of course he’s here,’ said mother, a little impatiently. ‘Where did you think he was?’
Anthea went round the foot of the big mahogany bed. There was a pause.
‘He’s not here NOW,’ she said.
That he had been there was plain, from the toilet-cover on the floor, the scattered pots and bottles, the wandering brushes and combs, all involved in the tangle of ribbons and laces which an open drawer had yielded to the baby’s inquisitive fingers.
‘He must have crept out, then,’ said mother; ‘do keep him with you, there’s a darling. If I don’t get some sleep I shall be a wreck when father comes home.’
Anthea closed the door softly. Then she tore downstairs and burst into the nursery, crying —
‘He must have wished he was with mother. He’s been there all the time. “Aggety dag—”’
The unusual word was frozen on her lip, as people say in books.
For there, on the floor, lay the carpet, and on the carpet, surrounded by his brothers and by Jane, sat the Lamb. He had covered his face and clothes with vaseline and violet powder, but he was easily recognizable in spite of this disguise.
‘You are right,’ said the Phoenix, who was also present; ‘it is evident that, as you say, “Aggety dag” is Bosh for “I want to be where my mother is,” and so the faithful carpet understood it.’
‘But how,’ said Anthea, catching up the Lamb and hugging him—’how did he get back here?’
‘Oh,’ said the Phoenix, ‘I flew to the Psammead and wished that your infant brother were restored to your midst, and immediately it was so.’
‘Oh, I am glad, I am glad!’ cried Anthea, still hugging the baby. ‘Oh, you darling! Shut up, Jane! I don’t care HOW much he comes off on me! Cyril! You and Robert roll that carpet up and put it in the beetle-cupboard. He might say “Aggety dag” again, and it might mean something quite different next time. Now, my Lamb, Panther’ll clean you a little. Come on.’
‘I hope the beetles won’t go wishing,’ said Cyril, as they rolled up the carpet.
Two days later mother was well enough to go out, and that evening the coconut matting came home. The children had talked and talked, and thought and thought, but they had not found any polite way of telling the Phoenix that they did not want it to stay any longer.
The days had been days spent by the children in embarrassment, and by the Phoenix in sleep.
And, now the matting was laid down, the Phoenix awoke and fluttered down on to it.
It shook its crested head.
‘I like not this carpet,’ it said; ‘it is harsh and unyielding, and it hurts my golden feet.’
‘We’ve jolly well got to get used to its hurting OUR golden feet,’ said Cyril.
‘This, then,’ said the bird, ‘supersedes the Wishing Carpet.’
‘Yes,’ said Robert, ‘if you mean that it’s instead of it.’
‘And the magic web?’ inquired the Phoenix, with sudden eagerness.
‘It’s the rag-and-bottle man’s day to-morrow,’ said Anthea, in a low voice; ‘he will take it away.’
The Phoenix fluttered up to its favourite perch on the chair-back.
‘Hear me!’ it cried, ‘oh youthful children of men, and restrain your tears of misery and despair, for what must be must be, and I would not remember you, thousands of years hence, as base ingrates and crawling worms compact of low selfishness.’
‘I should hope not, indeed,’ said Cyril.
‘Weep not,’ the bird went on; ‘I really do beg that you won’t weep.
I will not seek to break the news to you gently. Let the blow fall at once. The time has come when I must leave you.’
All four children breathed forth a long sigh of relief.
‘We needn’t have bothered so about how to break the news to it,’ whispered Cyril.
‘Ah, sigh not so,’ said the bird, gently. ‘All meetings end in partings. I must leave you. I have sought to prepare you for this. Ah, do not give way!’
‘Must you really go — so soon?’ murmured Anthea. It was what she had often heard her mother say to calling ladies in the afternoon.
‘I must, really; thank you so much, dear,’ replied the bird, just as though it had been one of the ladies.
‘I am weary,’ it went on. ‘I desire to rest — after all the happenings of this last moon I do desire really to rest, and I ask of you one last boon.’
‘Any little thing we can do,’ said Robert.
Now that it had really come to parting with the Phoenix, whose favourite he had always been, Robert did feel almost as miserable as the Phoenix thought they all did.
‘I ask but the relic designed for the rag-and-bottle man. Give me what is left of the carpet and let me go.’
‘Dare we?’ said Anthea. ‘Would mother mind?’
‘I have dared greatly for your sakes,’ remarked the bird.
‘Well, then, we will,’ said Robert.
The Phoenix fluffed out its feathers joyously.
‘Nor shall you regret it, children of golden hearts,’ it said. ‘Quick — spread the carpet and leave me alone; but first pile high the fire. Then, while I am immersed in the sacred preliminary rites, do ye prepare sweet-smelling woods and spices for the last act of parting.’
The children spread out what was left of the carpet. And, after all, though this was just what they would have wished to have happened, all hearts were sad. Then they put half a scuttle of coal on the fire and went out, closing the door on the Phoenix — left, at last, alone with the carpet.
‘One of us must keep watch,’ said Robert, excitedly, as soon as they were all out of the room, ‘and the others can go and buy sweet woods and spices. Get the very best that money can buy, and plenty of them. Don’t let’s stand to a threepence or so. I want it to have a jolly good send-off. It’s the only thing that’ll make us feel less horrid inside.’
It was felt that Robert, as the pet of the Phoenix, ought to have the last melancholy pleasure of choosing the materials for its funeral pyre.
‘I’ll keep watch if you like,’ said Cyril. ‘I don’t mind. And, besides, it’s raining hard, and my boots let in the wet. You might call and see if my other ones are “really reliable” again yet.’
So they left Cyril, standing like a Roman sentinel outside the door inside which the Phoenix was getting ready for the great change, and they all went out to buy the precious things for the last sad rites.
‘Robert is right,’ Anthea said; ‘this is no time for being careful about our money. Let’s go to the stationer’s first, and buy a whole packet of lead-pencils. They’re cheaper if you buy them by the packet.’
This was a thing that they had always wanted to do, but it needed the great excitement of a funeral pyre and a parting from a beloved Phoenix to screw them up to the extravagance.
The people at the stationer’s said that the pencils were real cedar-wood, so I hope they were, for stationers should always speak the truth. At any rate they cost one-and-fourpence. Also they spent sevenpence three-farthings on a little sandal-wood box inlaid with ivory.
‘Because,’ said Anthea, ‘I know sandalwood smells sweet, and when it’s burned it smells very sweet indeed.’
‘Ivory doesn’t smell at all,’ said Robert, ‘b
ut I expect when you burn it it smells most awful vile, like bones.’
At the grocer’s they bought all the spices they could remember the names of — shell-like mace, cloves like blunt nails, peppercorns, the long and the round kind; ginger, the dry sort, of course; and the beautiful bloom-covered shells of fragrant cinnamon. Allspice too, and caraway seeds (caraway seeds that smelt most deadly when the time came for burning them).
Camphor and oil of lavender were bought at the chemist’s, and also a little scent sachet labelled ‘Violettes de Parme’.
They took the things home and found Cyril still on guard. When they had knocked and the golden voice of the Phoenix had said ‘Come in,’ they went in.
There lay the carpet — or what was left of it — and on it lay an egg, exactly like the one out of which the Phoenix had been hatched.
The Phoenix was walking round and round the egg, clucking with joy and pride.
‘I’ve laid it, you see,’ it said, ‘and as fine an egg as ever I laid in all my born days.’
Every one said yes, it was indeed a beauty.
The things which the children had bought were now taken out of their papers and arranged on the table, and when the Phoenix had been persuaded to leave its egg for a moment and look at the materials for its last fire it was quite overcome.
‘Never, never have I had a finer pyre than this will be. You shall not regret it,’ it said, wiping away a golden tear. ‘Write quickly: “Go and tell the Psammead to fulfil the last wish of the Phoenix, and return instantly”.’
But Robert wished to be polite and he wrote —
‘Please go and ask the Psammead to be so kind as to fulfil the Phoenix’s last wish, and come straight back, if you please.’ The paper was pinned to the carpet, which vanished and returned in the flash of an eye.
Then another paper was written ordering the carpet to take the egg somewhere where it wouldn’t be hatched for another two thousand years. The Phoenix tore itself away from its cherished egg, which it watched with yearning tenderness till, the paper being pinned on, the carpet hastily rolled itself up round the egg, and both vanished for ever from the nursery of the house in Camden Town.
‘Oh, dear! oh, dear! oh, dear!’ said everybody.
‘Bear up,’ said the bird; ‘do you think I don’t suffer, being parted from my precious new-laid egg like this? Come, conquer your emotions and build my fire.’
‘OH!’ cried Robert, suddenly, and wholly breaking down, ‘I can’t BEAR you to go!’
The Phoenix perched on his shoulder and rubbed its beak softly against his ear.
‘The sorrows of youth soon appear but as dreams,’ it said. ‘Farewell, Robert of my heart. I have loved you well.’
The fire had burnt to a red glow. One by one the spices and sweet woods were laid on it. Some smelt nice and some — the caraway seeds and the Violettes de Parme sachet among them — smelt worse than you would think possible.
‘Farewell, farewell, farewell, farewell!’ said the Phoenix, in a far-away voice.
‘Oh, GOOD-BYE,’ said every one, and now all were in tears.
The bright bird fluttered seven times round the room and settled in the hot heart of the fire. The sweet gums and spices and woods flared and flickered around it, but its golden feathers did not burn. It seemed to grow red-hot to the very inside heart of it — and then before the eight eyes of its friends it fell together, a heap of white ashes, and the flames of the cedar pencils and the sandal-wood box met and joined above it.
‘Whatever have you done with the carpet?’ asked mother next day.
‘We gave it to some one who wanted it very much. The name began with a P,’ said Jane.
The others instantly hushed her.
‘Oh, well, it wasn’t worth twopence,’ said mother.
‘The person who began with P said we shouldn’t lose by it,’ Jane went on before she could be stopped.
‘I daresay!’ said mother, laughing.
But that very night a great box came, addressed to the children by all their names. Eliza never could remember the name of the carrier who brought it. It wasn’t Carter Paterson or the Parcels Delivery.
It was instantly opened. It was a big wooden box, and it had to be opened with a hammer and the kitchen poker; the long nails came squeaking out, and boards scrunched as they were wrenched off. Inside the box was soft paper, with beautiful Chinese patterns on it — blue and green and red and violet. And under the paper — well, almost everything lovely that you can think of. Everything of reasonable size, I mean; for, of course, there were no motors or flying machines or thoroughbred chargers. But there really was almost everything else. Everything that the children had always wanted — toys and games and books, and chocolate and candied cherries and paint-boxes and photographic cameras, and all the presents they had always wanted to give to father and mother and the Lamb, only they had never had the money for them. At the very bottom of the box was a tiny golden feather. No one saw it but Robert, and he picked it up and hid it in the breast of his jacket, which had been so often the nesting-place of the golden bird. When he went to bed the feather was gone. It was the last he ever saw of the Phoenix.
Pinned to the lovely fur cloak that mother had always wanted was a paper, and it said —
‘In return for the carpet. With gratitude. — P.’
You may guess how father and mother talked it over. They decided at last the person who had had the carpet, and whom, curiously enough, the children were quite unable to describe, must be an insane millionaire who amused himself by playing at being a rag-and-bone man. But the children knew better.
They knew that this was the fulfilment, by the powerful Psammead, of the last wish of the Phoenix, and that this glorious and delightful boxful of treasures was really the very, very, very end of the Phoenix and the Carpet.
THE STORY OF THE AMULET
T. Fisher Unwin of London published The Story of the Amulet, in 1906, the final novel in a trilogy featuring five children and their magical, often hilarious adventures. Dutton produced the American edition a year later. In The Story of the Amulet, the children reunite with the Psammead, the Sand Fairy who provided the magic in Five Children and It. While exploring a London shop, the children find the Psammead captive and set him free. No longer able to grant wishes to the children, the Psammead instead serves as advisor to them after they purchase an ancient amulet, which is supposed to grant them their heart’s desire. However, first they must find its other half. The half-amulet acts as a portal to the past and the children visit, among other times and places, Babylon, the Phoenician city of Tyre and Atlantis. Nesbit dedicated the novel to Sir E. A. Wallis Budge, translator of The Egyptian Book of the Dead and Egyptologist at the British Museum. Budge had helped the author with her research while writing the novel. Interestingly, C. S. Lewis borrowed elements of The Story of the Amulet for his Narnia series novels, The Horse and His Boy and The Magician’s Nephew.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER 1. THE PSAMMEAD
CHAPTER 2. THE HALF AMULET
CHAPTER 3. THE PAST
CHAPTER 4. EIGHT THOUSAND YEARS AGO
CHAPTER 5. THE FIGHT IN THE VILLAGE
CHAPTER 6. THE WAY TO BABYLON
CHAPTER 7. ‘THE DEEPEST DUNGEON BELOW THE CASTLE MOAT’
CHAPTER 8. THE QUEEN IN LONDON
CHAPTER 9. ATLANTIS
CHAPTER 10. THE LITTLE BLACK GIRL AND JULIUS CAESAR
CHAPTER 11. BEFORE PHARAOH
CHAPTER 12. THE SORRY-PRESENT AND THE EXPELLED LITTLE BOY
CHAPTER 13. THE SHIPWRECK ON THE TIN ISLANDS
CHAPTER 14. THE HEART’S DESIRE
TO
Dr Wallis Budge
of the British Museum as a
small token of gratitude for his
unfailing kindness and help
in the making of it
CHAPTER 1. THE PSAMMEAD
There were once four children who spent their summer holidays in a white house, happily situated b
etween a sandpit and a chalkpit. One day they had the good fortune to find in the sandpit a strange creature. Its eyes were on long horns like 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 — and it had hands and feet like a monkey’s. It told the children — whose names were Cyril, Robert, Anthea, and Jane — that it was a Psammead or sand-fairy. (Psammead is pronounced Sammy-ad.) It was old, old, old, and its birthday was almost at the very beginning of everything. And it had been buried in the sand for thousands of years. But it still kept its fairylikeness, and part of this fairylikeness was its power to give people whatever they wished for. You know fairies have always been able to do this. Cyril, Robert, Anthea, and Jane now found their wishes come true; but, somehow, they never could think of just the right things to wish for, and their wishes sometimes turned out very oddly indeed. In the end their unwise wishings landed them in what Robert called ‘a very tight place indeed’, and the Psammead consented to help them out of it in return for their promise never never to ask it to grant them any more wishes, and never to tell anyone about it, because it did not want to be bothered to give wishes to anyone ever any more. At the moment of parting Jane said politely —
‘I wish we were going to see you again some day.’
And the Psammead, touched by this friendly thought, granted the wish. The book about all this is called Five Children and It, and it ends up in a most tiresome way by saying —
‘The children DID see the Psammead again, but it was not in the sandpit; it was — but I must say no more—’
The reason that nothing more could be said was that I had not then been able to find out exactly when and where the children met the Psammead again. Of course I knew they would meet it, because it was a beast of its word, and when it said a thing would happen, that thing happened without fail. How different from the people who tell us about what weather it is going to be on Thursday next, in London, the South Coast, and Channel!