by E. Nesbit
CHAPTER 3. THE PAST
The learned gentleman had let his dinner get quite cold. It was muttonchop, and as it lay on the plate it looked like a brown island in themiddle of a frozen pond, because the grease of the gravy had becomecold, and consequently white. It looked very nasty, and it was the firstthing the children saw when, after knocking three times and receivingno reply, one of them ventured to turn the handle and softly to open thedoor. The chop was on the end of a long table that ran down one side ofthe room. The table had images on it and queer-shaped stones, and books.And there were glass cases fixed against the wall behind, with littlestrange things in them. The cases were rather like the ones you see injewellers' shops.
The 'poor learned gentleman' was sitting at a table in the window,looking at something very small which he held in a pair of fine pincers.He had a round spy-glass sort of thing in one eye--which remindedthe children of watchmakers, and also of the long snail's eyes of thePsammead. The gentleman was very long and thin, and his long, thin bootsstuck out under the other side of his table. He did not hear the dooropen, and the children stood hesitating. At last Robert gave the door apush, and they all started back, for in the middle of the wall that thedoor had hidden was a mummy-case--very, very, very big--painted in redand yellow and green and black, and the face of it seemed to look atthem quite angrily.
You know what a mummy-case is like, of course? If you don't you hadbetter go to the British Museum at once and find out. Anyway, it is notat all the sort of thing that you expect to meet in a top-floor frontin Bloomsbury, looking as though it would like to know what business YOUhad there.
So everyone said, 'Oh!' rather loud, and their boots clattered as theystumbled back.
The learned gentleman took the glass out of his eye and said--'I begyour pardon,' in a very soft, quiet pleasant voice--the voice of agentleman who has been to Oxford.
'It's us that beg yours,' said Cyril politely. 'We are sorry to disturbyou.'
'Come in,' said the gentleman, rising--with the most distinguishedcourtesy, Anthea told herself. 'I am delighted to see you. Won't you sitdown? No, not there; allow me to move that papyrus.'
He cleared a chair, and stood smiling and looking kindly through hislarge, round spectacles.
'He treats us like grown-ups,' whispered Robert, 'and he doesn't seem toknow how many of us there are.'
'Hush,' said Anthea, 'it isn't manners to whisper. You say, Cyril--goahead.'
'We're very sorry to disturb you,' said Cyril politely, 'but we didknock three times, and you didn't say "Come in", or "Run away now", orthat you couldn't be bothered just now, or to come when you weren't sobusy, or any of the things people do say when you knock at doors, so weopened it. We knew you were in because we heard you sneeze while we werewaiting.'
'Not at all,' said the gentleman; 'do sit down.'
'He has found out there are four of us,' said Robert, as the gentlemancleared three more chairs. He put the things off them carefully on thefloor. The first chair had things like bricks that tiny, tiny birds'feet have walked over when the bricks were soft, only the marks were inregular lines. The second chair had round things on it like very large,fat, long, pale beads. And the last chair had a pile of dusty papers onit. The children sat down.
'We know you are very, very learned,' said Cyril, 'and we have got acharm, and we want you to read the name on it, because it isn't in Latinor Greek, or Hebrew, or any of the languages WE know--'
'A thorough knowledge of even those languages is a very fair foundationon which to build an education,' said the gentleman politely.
'Oh!' said Cyril blushing, 'but we only know them to look at, exceptLatin--and I'm only in Caesar with that.' The gentleman took off hisspectacles and laughed. His laugh sounded rusty, Cyril thought, asthough it wasn't often used.
'Of course!' he said. 'I'm sure I beg your pardon. I think I must havebeen in a dream. You are the children who live downstairs, are you not?Yes. I have seen you as I have passed in and out. And you have foundsomething that you think to be an antiquity, and you've brought it toshow me? That was very kind. I should like to inspect it.'
'I'm afraid we didn't think about your liking to inspect it,' said thetruthful Anthea. 'It was just for US because we wanted to know the nameon it--'
'Oh, yes--and, I say,' Robert interjected, 'you won't think it rudeof us if we ask you first, before we show it, to be bound in thewhat-do-you-call-it of--'
'In the bonds of honour and upright dealing,' said Anthea.
'I'm afraid I don't quite follow you,' said the gentleman, with gentlenervousness.
'Well, it's this way,' said Cyril. 'We've got part of a charm. And theSammy--I mean, something told us it would work, though it's only half aone; but it won't work unless we can say the name that's on it. But, ofcourse, if you've got another name that can lick ours, our charm willbe no go; so we want you to give us your word of honour as agentleman--though I'm sure, now I've seen you, that it's not necessary;but still I've promised to ask you, so we must. Will you please give usyour honourable word not to say any name stronger than the name on ourcharm?'
The gentleman had put on his spectacles again and was looking at Cyrilthrough them. He now said: 'Bless me!' more than once, adding, 'Who toldyou all this?'
'I can't tell you,' said Cyril. 'I'm very sorry, but I can't.'
Some faint memory of a far-off childhood must have come to the learnedgentleman just then, for he smiled. 'I see,' he said. 'It is some sortof game that you are engaged in? Of course! Yes! Well, I will certainlypromise. Yet I wonder how you heard of the names of power?'
'We can't tell you that either,' said Cyril; and Anthea said, 'Here isour charm,' and held it out.
With politeness, but without interest, the gentleman took it. But afterthe first glance all his body suddenly stiffened, as a pointer's doeswhen he sees a partridge.
'Excuse me,' he said in quite a changed voice, and carried the charm tothe window. He looked at it; he turned it over. He fixed his spy-glassin his eye and looked again. No one said anything. Only Robert made ashuffling noise with his feet till Anthea nudged him to shut up. At lastthe learned gentleman drew a long breath.
'Where did you find this?' he asked.
'We didn't find it. We bought it at a shop. Jacob Absalom the nameis--not far from Charing Cross,' said Cyril.
'We gave seven-and-sixpence for it,' added Jane.
'It is not for sale, I suppose? You do not wish to part with it?
I ought to tell you that it is extremely valuable--extraordinarilyvaluable, I may say.'
'Yes,' said Cyril, 'we know that, so of course we want to keep it.'
'Keep it carefully, then,' said the gentleman impressively; 'and if everyou should wish to part with it, may I ask you to give me the refusal ofit?'
'The refusal?'
'I mean, do not sell it to anyone else until you have given me theopportunity of buying it.'
'All right,' said Cyril, 'we won't. But we don't want to sell it. Wewant to make it do things.'
'I suppose you can play at that as well as at anything else,' said thegentleman; 'but I'm afraid the days of magic are over.'
'They aren't REALLY,' said Anthea earnestly. 'You'd see they aren't if Icould tell you about our last summer holidays. Only I mustn't. Thank youvery much. And can you read the name?'
'Yes, I can read it.'
'Will you tell it us?' 'The name,' said the gentleman, 'is Ur HekauSetcheh.'
'Ur Hekau Setcheh,' repeated Cyril. 'Thanks awfully. I do hope wehaven't taken up too much of your time.'
'Not at all,' said the gentleman. 'And do let me entreat you to be very,very careful of that most valuable specimen.'
They said 'Thank you' in all the different polite ways they could thinkof, and filed out of the door and down the stairs. Anthea was last.Half-way down to the first landing she turned and ran up again.
The door was still open, and the learned gentleman and the mummy-casewere standing opposite to each other, and both look
ed as though they hadstood like that for years.
The gentleman started when Anthea put her hand on his arm.
'I hope you won't be cross and say it's not my business,' she said,'but do look at your chop! Don't you think you ought to eat it? Fatherforgets his dinner sometimes when he's writing, and Mother always says Iought to remind him if she's not at home to do it herself, because it'sso bad to miss your regular meals.
So I thought perhaps you wouldn't mind my reminding you, because youdon't seem to have anyone else to do it.'
She glanced at the mummy-case; IT certainly did not look as though itwould ever think of reminding people of their meals.
The learned gentleman looked at her for a moment before he said--
'Thank you, my dear. It was a kindly thought. No, I haven't anyone toremind me about things like that.'
He sighed, and looked at the chop.
'It looks very nasty,' said Anthea.
'Yes,' he said, 'it does. I'll eat it immediately, before I forget.'
As he ate it he sighed more than once. Perhaps because the chop wasnasty, perhaps because he longed for the charm which the children didnot want to sell, perhaps because it was so long since anyone caredwhether he ate his chops or forgot them.
Anthea caught the others at the stair-foot. They woke the Psammead, andit taught them exactly how to use the word of power, and to make thecharm speak. I am not going to tell you how this is done, because youmight try to do it. And for you any such trying would be almost sureto end in disappointment. Because in the first place it is a thousandmillion to one against your ever getting hold of the right sort ofcharm, and if you did, there would be hardly any chance at all of yourfinding a learned gentleman clever enough and kind enough to read theword for you.
The children and the Psammead crouched in a circle on the floor--in thegirls' bedroom, because in the parlour they might have been interruptedby old Nurse's coming in to lay the cloth for tea--and the charm was putin the middle of the circle.
The sun shone splendidly outside, and the room was very light. Throughthe open window came the hum and rattle of London, and in the streetbelow they could hear the voice of the milkman.
When all was ready, the Psammead signed to Anthea to say the word. Andshe said it. Instantly the whole light of all the world seemed to goout. The room was dark. The world outside was dark--darker than thedarkest night that ever was. And all the sounds went out too, so thatthere was a silence deeper than any silence you have ever even dreamedof imagining. It was like being suddenly deaf and blind, only darker andquieter even than that.
But before the children had got over the sudden shock of it enough to befrightened, a faint, beautiful light began to show in the middle of thecircle, and at the same moment a faint, beautiful voice began to speak.The light was too small for one to see anything by, and the voice wastoo small for you to hear what it said. You could just see the light andjust hear the voice.
But the light grew stronger. It was greeny, like glow-worms' lamps,and it grew and grew till it was as though thousands and thousands ofglow-worms were signalling to their winged sweethearts from the middleof the circle. And the voice grew, not so much in loudness as insweetness (though it grew louder, too), till it was so sweet thatyou wanted to cry with pleasure just at the sound of it. It was likenightingales, and the sea, and the fiddle, and the voice of your motherwhen you have been a long time away, and she meets you at the door whenyou get home.
And the voice said--
'Speak. What is it that you would hear?'
I cannot tell you what language the voice used. I only know thateveryone present understood it perfectly. If you come to think of it,there must be some language that everyone could understand, if we onlyknew what it was. Nor can I tell you how the charm spoke, nor whetherit was the charm that spoke, or some presence in the charm. The childrencould not have told you either. Indeed, they could not look at the charmwhile it was speaking, because the light was too bright. They lookedinstead at the green radiance on the faded Kidderminster carpet at theedge of the circle. They all felt very quiet, and not inclined to askquestions or fidget with their feet. For this was not like the thingsthat had happened in the country when the Psammead had given them theirwishes. That had been funny somehow, and this was not. It was somethinglike Arabian Nights magic, and something like being in church. No onecared to speak.
It was Cyril who said at last--
'Please we want to know where the other half of the charm is.'
'The part of the Amulet which is lost,' said the beautiful voice, 'wasbroken and ground into the dust of the shrine that held it. It and thepin that joined the two halves are themselves dust, and the dust isscattered over many lands and sunk in many seas.'
'Oh, I say!' murmured Robert, and a blank silence fell. 'Then it's allup?' said Cyril at last; 'it's no use our looking for a thing that'ssmashed into dust, and the dust scattered all over the place.'
'If you would find it,' said the voice, 'You must seek it where it stillis, perfect as ever.'
'I don't understand,' said Cyril.
'In the Past you may find it,' said the voice.
'I wish we MAY find it,' said Cyril.
The Psammead whispered crossly, 'Don't you understand? The thing existedin the Past. If you were in the Past, too, you could find it. It's verydifficult to make you understand things. Time and space are only formsof thought.'
'I see,' said Cyril.
'No, you don't,' said the Psammead, 'and it doesn't matter if you don't,either. What I mean is that if you were only made the right way, youcould see everything happening in the same place at the same time. Nowdo you see?'
'I'm afraid _I_ don't,' said Anthea; 'I'm sorry I'm so stupid.'
'Well, at any rate, you see this. That lost half of the Amulet is in thePast. Therefore it's in the Past we must look for it. I mustn't speak tothe charm myself. Ask it things! Find out!'
'Where can we find the other part of you?' asked Cyril obediently.
'In the Past,' said the voice.
'What part of the Past?'
'I may not tell you. If you will choose a time, I will take you to theplace that then held it. You yourselves must find it.'
'When did you see it last?' asked Anthea--'I mean, when was it takenaway from you?'
The beautiful voice answered--
'That was thousands of years ago. The Amulet was perfect then, and layin a shrine, the last of many shrines, and I worked wonders. Then camestrange men with strange weapons and destroyed my shrine, and the Amuletthey bore away with many captives. But of these, one, my priest, knewthe word of power, and spoke it for me, so that the Amulet becameinvisible, and thus returned to my shrine, but the shrine was brokendown, and ere any magic could rebuild it one spoke a word before whichmy power bowed down and was still. And the Amulet lay there, stillperfect, but enslaved. Then one coming with stones to rebuild theshrine, dropped a hewn stone on the Amulet as it lay, and one half wassundered from the other. I had no power to seek for that which was lost.And there being none to speak the word of power, I could not rejoin it.So the Amulet lay in the dust of the desert many thousand years, and atlast came a small man, a conqueror with an army, and after him a crowdof men who sought to seem wise, and one of these found half the Amuletand brought it to this land. But none could read the name. So I laystill. And this man dying and his son after him, the Amulet was sold bythose who came after to a merchant, and from him you bought it, and itis here, and now, the name of power having been spoken, I also am here.'
This is what the voice said. I think it must have meant Napoleon by thesmall man, the conqueror. Because I know I have been told that he tookan army to Egypt, and that afterwards a lot of wise people went grubbingin the sand, and fished up all sorts of wonderful things, older thanyou would think possible. And of these I believe this charm to have beenone, and the most wonderful one of all.
Everyone listened: and everyone tried to think. It is not easy to dothis clearly when you have been l
istening to the kind of talk I havetold you about.
At last Robert said--
'Can you take us into the Past--to the shrine where you and the otherthing were together. If you could take us there, we might find the otherpart still there after all these thousands of years.'
'Still there? silly!' said Cyril. 'Don't you see, if we go back into thePast it won't be thousands of years ago. It will be NOW for us--won'tit?' He appealed to the Psammead, who said--
'You're not so far off the idea as you usually are!'
'Well,' said Anthea, 'will you take us back to when there was a shrineand you were safe in it--all of you?'
'Yes,' said the voice. 'You must hold me up, and speak the word ofpower, and one by one, beginning with the first-born, you shall passthrough me into the Past. But let the last that passes be the one thatholds me, and let him not lose his hold, lest you lose me, and so remainin the Past for ever.'
'That's a nasty idea,' said Robert.
'When you desire to return,' the beautiful voice went on, 'hold me uptowards the East, and speak the word. Then, passing through me, youshall return to this time and it shall be the present to you.'
'But how--' A bell rang loudly.
'Oh crikey!' exclaimed Robert, 'that's tea! Will you please make itproper daylight again so that we can go down. And thank you so much forall your kindness.'
'We've enjoyed ourselves very much indeed, thank you!' added Antheapolitely.
The beautiful light faded slowly. The great darkness and silence cameand these suddenly changed to the dazzlement of day and the great soft,rustling sound of London, that is like some vast beast turning over inits sleep.
The children rubbed their eyes, the Psammead ran quickly to its sandybath, and the others went down to tea. And until the cups were actuallyfilled tea seemed less real than the beautiful voice and the greenylight.
After tea Anthea persuaded the others to allow her to hang the charmround her neck with a piece of string.
'It would be so awful if it got lost,' she said: 'it might get lostanywhere, you know, and it would be rather beastly for us to have tostay in the Past for ever and ever, wouldn't it?'