The morning after the adventure of the Persian cats, the musk-rats, the common cow, and the uncommon burglar, all the children slept till it was ten o’clock; and then it was only Cyril who woke; but he attended to the others, so that by half past ten every one was ready to help to get breakfast. It was shivery cold, and there was but little in the house that was really worth eating.
Robert had arranged a thoughtful little surprise for the absent servants. He had made a neat and delightful booby trap over the kitchen door, and as soon as they heard the front door click open and knew the servants had come back, all four children hid in the cupboard under the stairs and listened with delight to the entrance—the tumble, the splash, the scuffle, and the remarks of the servants. They heard the cook say it was a judgement on them for leaving the place to itself; she seemed to think that a booby trap was a kind of plant that was quite likely to grow, all by itself, in a dwelling that was left shut up. But the housemaid, more acute, judged that someone must have been in the house—a view confirmed by the sight of the breakfast things on the nursery table.
The cupboard under the stairs was very tight and paraffiny, however, and a silent struggle for a place on top ended in the door bursting open and discharging Jane, who rolled like a football to the feet of the servants.
‘Now,’ said Cyril, firmly, when the cook’s hysterics had become quieter, and the housemaid had time to say what she thought of them, ‘don’t you begin jawing us. We aren’t going to stand it. We know too much. You’ll please make an extra special treacle roley for dinner, and we’ll have a tinned tongue.’
‘I daresay,’ said the housemaid, indignant, still in her outdoor things and with her hat very much on one side. ‘Don’t you come a-threatening me, Master Cyril, because I won’t stand it, so I tell you. You tell your ma about us being out? Much I care! She’ll be sorry for me when she hears about my dear great-aunt by marriage as brought me up from a child and was a mother to me. She sent for me, she did, she wasn’t expected to last the night, from the spasms going to her legs—and cook was that kind and careful she couldn’t let me go alone, so—’
‘Don’t,’ said Anthea, in real distress. ‘You know where liars go to, Eliza—at least if you don’t—’
‘Liars indeed!’ said Eliza, ‘I won’t demean myself talking to you.’
‘How’s Mrs Wigson?’ said Robert, ‘and DID you keep it up last night?’
The mouth of the housemaid fell open.
‘Did you doss with Maria or Emily?’ asked Cyril.
‘How did Mrs Prosser enjoy herself?’ asked Jane.
‘Forbear,’ said Cyril, ‘they’ve had enough. Whether we tell or not depends on your later life,’ he went on, addressing the servants. ‘If you are decent to us we’ll be decent to you. You’d better make that treacle roley—and if I were you, Eliza, I’d do a little housework and cleaning, just for a change.’
The servants gave in once and for all.
‘There’s nothing like firmness,’ Cyril went on, when the breakfast things were cleared away and the children were alone in the nursery. ‘People are always talking of difficulties with servants. It’s quite simple, when you know the way. We can do what we like now and they won’t peach. I think we’ve broken THEIR proud spirit. Let’s go somewhere by carpet.’
‘I wouldn’t if I were you,’ said the Phoenix, yawning, as it swooped down from its roost on the curtain pole. ‘I’ve given you one or two hints, but now concealment is at an end, and I see I must speak out.’
It perched on the back of a chair and swayed to and fro, like a parrot on a swing.
‘What’s the matter now?’ said Anthea. She was not quite so gentle as usual, because she was still weary from the excitement of last night’s cats. ‘I’m tired of things happening. I shan’t go anywhere on the carpet. I’m going to darn my stockings.’
‘Darn!’ said the Phoenix, ‘darn! From those young lips these strange expressions—’
‘Mend, then,’ said Anthea, ‘with a needle and wool.’
The Phoenix opened and shut its wings thoughtfully.
‘Your stockings,’ it said, ‘are much less important than they now appear to you. But the carpet—look at the bare worn patches, look at the great rent at yonder corner. The carpet has been your faithful friend—your willing servant. How have you requited its devoted service?’
‘Dear Phoenix,’ Anthea urged, ‘don’t talk in that horrid lecturing tone. You make me feel as if I’d done something wrong. And really it is a wishing carpet, and we haven’t done anything else to it—only wishes.’
‘Only wishes,’ repeated the Phoenix, ruffling its neck feathers angrily, ‘and what sort of wishes? Wishing people to be in a good temper, for instance. What carpet did you ever hear of that had such a wish asked of it? But this noble fabric, on which you trample so recklessly’ (every one removed its boots from the carpet and stood on the linoleum), ‘this carpet never flinched. It did what you asked, but the wear and tear must have been awful. And then last night—I don’t blame you about the cats and the rats, for those were its own choice; but what carpet could stand a heavy cow hanging on to it at one corner?’
‘I should think the cats and rats were worse,’ said Robert, ‘look at all their claws.’
‘Yes,’ said the bird, ‘eleven thousand nine hundred and forty of them—I daresay you noticed? I should be surprised if these had not left their mark.’
‘Good gracious,’ said Jane, sitting down suddenly on the floor, and patting the edge of the carpet softly; ‘do you mean it’s WEARING OUT?’
‘Its life with you has not been a luxurious one,’ said the Phoenix.
‘French mud twice. Sand of sunny shores twice. Soaking in southern seas once. India once. Goodness knows where in Persia once. Musk-rat-land once. And once, wherever the cow came from. Hold your carpet up to the light, and with cautious tenderness, if YOU please.’
With cautious tenderness the boys held the carpet up to the light; the girls looked, and a shiver of regret ran through them as they saw how those eleven thoousand nine hundred and forty claws had run through the carpet. It was full of little holes: there were some large ones, and more than one thin place. At one corner a strip of it was torn, and hung forlornly.
‘We must mend it,’ said Anthea; ‘never mind about my stockings. I can sew them up in lumps with sewing cotton if there’s no time to do them properly. I know it’s awful and no girl would who respected herself, and all that; but the poor dear carpet’s more important than my silly stockings. Let’s go out now this very minute.’
So out they all went, and bought wool to mend the carpet; but there is no shop in Camden Town where you can buy wishing-wool, no, nor in Kentish Town either. However, ordinary Scotch heather-mixture fingering seemed good enough, and this they bought, and all that day Jane and Anthea darned and darned and darned. The boys went out for a walk in the afternoon, and the gentle Phoenix paced up and down the table—for exercise, as it said—and talked to the industrious girls about their carpet.
‘It is not an ordinary, ignorant, innocent carpet from Kidderminster,’ it said, ‘it is a carpet with a past—a Persian past. Do you know that in happier years, when that carpet was the property of caliphs, viziers, kings, and sultans, it never lay on a floor?’
‘I thought the floor was the proper home of a carpet,’ Jane interrupted.
‘Not of a MAGIC carpet,’ said the Phoenix; ‘why, if it had been allowed to lie about on floors there wouldn’t be much of it left now. No, indeed! It has lived in chests of cedarwood, inlaid with pearl and ivory, wrapped in priceless tissues of cloth of gold, embroidered with gems of fabulous value. It has reposed in the sandal-wood caskets of princesses, and in the rose-attar-scented treasure-houses of kings. Never, never, had any one degraded it by walking on it—except in the way of business, when wishes were required, and then they always took their shoes off. And YOU—’
‘Oh, DON’T!’ said Jane, very near tears. ‘You know you’d never have been hatched at all if it hadn’t been for mother wanting a carpet for us to walk on.’
‘You needn’t have walked so much or so hard!’ said the bird, ‘but come, dry that crystal tear, and I will relate to you the story of the Princess Zulieka, the Prince of Asia, and the magic carpet.’
‘Relate away,’ said Anthea—‘I mean, please do.’
‘The Princess Zulieka, fairest of royal ladies,’ began the bird, ‘had in her cradle been the subject of several enchantments. Her grandmother had been in her day—’
But what in her day Zulieka’s grandmother had been was destined never to be revealed, for Cyril and Robert suddenly burst into the room, and on each brow were the traces of deep emotion. On Cyril’s pale brow stood beads of agitation and perspiration, and on the scarlet brow of Robert was a large black smear.
‘What ails ye both?’ asked the Phoenix, and it added tartly that story-telling was quite impossible if people would come interrupting like that.
‘Oh, do shut up, for any sake!’ said Cyril, sinking into a chair.
Robert smoothed the ruffled golden feathers, adding kindly—
‘Squirrel doesn’t mean to be a beast. It’s only that the MOST AWFUL thing has happened, and stories don’t seem to matter so much. Don’t be cross. You won’t be when you’ve heard what’s happened.’
‘Well, what HAS happened?’ said the bird, still rather crossly; and Anthea and Jane paused with long needles poised in air, and long needlefuls of Scotch heather-mixture fingering wool drooping from them.
‘The most awful thing you can possibly think of,’ said Cyril. ‘That nice chap—our own burglar—the police have got him, on suspicion of stolen cats. That’s what his brother’s missis told me.’
‘Oh, begin at the beginning!’ cried Anthea impatiently.
‘Well, then, we went out, and down by where the undertaker’s is, with the china flowers in the window—you know. There was a crowd, and of course we went to have a squint. And it was two bobbies and our burglar between them, and he was being dragged along; and he said, “I tell you them cats was GIVE me. I got ‘em in exchange for me milking a cow in a basement parlour up Camden Town way.”
‘And the people laughed. Beasts! And then one of the policemen said perhaps he could give the name and address of the cow, and he said, no, he couldn’t; but he could take them there if they’d only leave go of his coat collar, and give him a chance to get his breath. And the policeman said he could tell all that to the magistrate in the morning. He didn’t see us, and so we came away.’
‘Oh, Cyril, how COULD you?’ said Anthea.
‘Don’t be a pudding-head,’ Cyril advised. ‘A fat lot of good it would have done if we’d let him see us. No one would have believed a word we said. They’d have thought we were kidding. We did better than let him see us. We asked a boy where he lived and he told us, and we went there, and it’s a little greengrocer’s shop, and we bought some Brazil nuts. Here they are.’ The girls waved away the Brazil nuts with loathing and contempt.
‘Well, we had to buy SOMETHING, and while we were making up our minds what to buy we heard his brother’s missis talking. She said when he came home with all them miaoulers she thought there was more in it than met the eye. But he WOULD go out this morning with the two likeliest of them, one under each arm. She said he sent her out to buy blue ribbon to put round their beastly necks, and she said if he got three months’ hard it was her dying word that he’d got the blue ribbon to thank for it; that, and his own silly thieving ways, taking cats that anybody would know he couldn’t have come by in the way of business, instead of things that wouldn’t have been missed, which Lord knows there are plenty such, and—’
‘Oh, STOP!’ cried Jane. And indeed it was time, for Cyril seemed like a clock that had been wound up, and could not help going on. ‘Where is he now?’
‘At the police-station,’ said Robert, for Cyril was out of breath. ‘The boy told us they’d put him in the cells, and would bring him up before the Beak in the morning. I thought it was a jolly lark last night—getting him to take the cats—but now—’
‘The end of a lark,’ said the Phoenix, ‘is the Beak.’
‘Let’s go to him,’ cried both the girls jumping up. ‘Let’s go and tell the truth. They MUST believe us.’
‘They CAN’T,’ said Cyril. ‘Just think! If any one came to you with such a tale, you couldn’t believe it, however much you tried. We should only mix things up worse for him.’
‘There must be something we could do,’ said Jane, sniffing very much—‘my own dear pet burglar! I can’t bear it. And he was so nice, the way he talked about his father, and how he was going to be so extra honest. Dear Phoenix, you MUST be able to help us. You’re so good and kind and pretty and clever. Do, do tell us what to do.’
The Phoenix rubbed its beak thoughtfully with its claw.
‘You might rescue him,’ it said, ‘and conceal him here, till the law-supporters had forgotten about him.’
‘That would be ages and ages,’ said Cyril, ‘and we couldn’t conceal him here. Father might come home at any moment, and if he found the burglar here HE wouldn’t believe the true truth any more than the police would. That’s the worst of the truth. Nobody ever believes it. Couldn’t we take him somewhere else?’
Jane clapped her hands.
‘The sunny southern shore!’ she cried, ‘where the cook is being queen. He and she would be company for each other!’
And really the idea did not seem bad, if only he would consent to go.
So, all talking at once, the children arranged to wait till evening, and then to seek the dear burglar in his lonely cell.
Meantime Jane and Anthea darned away as hard as they could, to make the carpet as strong as possible. For all felt how terrible it would be if the precious burglar, while being carried to the sunny southern shore, were to tumble through a hole in the carpet, and be lost for ever in the sunny southern sea.
The servants were tired after Mrs Wigson’s party, so every one went to bed early, and when the Phoenix reported that both servants were snoring in a heartfelt and candid manner, the children got up—they had never undressed; just putting their nightgowns on over their things had been enough to deceive Eliza when she came to turn out the gas. So they were ready for anything, and they stood on the carpet and said—
‘I wish we were in our burglar’s lonely cell.’ and instantly they were.
I think every one had expected the cell to be the ‘deepest dungeon below the castle moat’. I am sure no one had doubted that the burglar, chained by heavy fetters to a ring in the damp stone wall, would be tossing uneasily on a bed of straw, with a pitcher of water and a mouldering crust, untasted, beside him. Robert, remembering the underground passage and the treasure, had brought a candle and matches, but these were not needed.
The cell was a little white-washed room about twelve feet long and six feet wide. On one side of it was a sort of shelf sloping a little towards the wall. On this were two rugs, striped blue and yellow, and a water-proof pillow. Rolled in the rugs, and with his head on the pillow, lay the burglar, fast asleep. (He had had his tea, though this the children did not know—it had come from the coffee-shop round the corner, in very thick crockery.) The scene was plainly revealed by the light of a gas-lamp in the passage outside, which shone into the cell through a pane of thick glass over the door.
‘I shall gag him,’ said Cyril, ‘and Robert will hold him down. Anthea and Jane and the Phoenix can whisper soft nothings to him while he gradually awakes.’
This plan did not have the success it deserved, because the burglar, curiously enough, was much stronger, even in his sleep, than Robert and Cyril, and at the first touch of their hands he leapt up and shouted out something very loud indeed.
Instantly steps were heard outside. Anthea threw her arms round the burglar and whispered—
‘It’s us—the ones that gave you the cats. We’ve come to save you, only don’t let on we’re here. Can’t we hide somewhere?’
Heavy boots sounded on the flagged passage outside, and a firm voice shouted—
‘Here—you—stop that row, will you?’
‘All right, governor,’ replied the burglar, still with Anthea’s arms round him; ‘I was only a-talking in my sleep. No offence.’
It was an awful moment. Would the boots and the voice come in. Yes! No! The voice said—
‘Well, stow it, will you?’
And the boots went heavily away, along the passage and up some sounding stone stairs.
‘Now then,’ whispered Anthea.
‘How the blue Moses did you get in?’ asked the burglar, in a hoarse whisper of amazement.
‘On the carpet,’ said Jane, truly.
‘Stow that,’ said the burglar. ‘One on you I could ‘a’ swallowed, but four—AND a yellow fowl.’
‘Look here,’ said Cyril, sternly, ‘you wouldn’t have believed any one if they’d told you beforehand about your finding a cow and all those cats in our nursery.’
‘That I wouldn’t,’ said the burglar, with whispered fervour, ‘so help me Bob, I wouldn’t.’
‘Well, then,’ Cyril went on, ignoring this appeal to his brother, ‘just try to believe what we tell you and act accordingly. It can’t do you any HARM, you know,’ he went on in hoarse whispered earnestness. ‘You can’t be very much worse off than you are now, you know. But if you’ll just trust to us we’ll get you out of this right enough. No one saw us come in. The question is, where would you like to go?’
‘I’d like to go to Boolong,’ was the instant reply of the burglar. ‘I’ve always wanted to go on that there trip, but I’ve never ‘ad the ready at the right time of the year.’
‘Boolong is a town like London,’ said Cyril, well meaning, but inaccurate, ‘how could you get a living there?’
The burglar scratched his head in deep doubt.
‘It’s ‘ard to get a ‘onest living anywheres nowadays,’ he said, and his voice was sad.
‘Yes, isn’t it?’ said Jane, sympathetically; ‘but how about a sunny southern shore, where there’s nothing to do at all unless you want to.’
‘That’s my billet, miss,’ replied the burglar. ‘I never did care about work—not like some people, always fussing about.’
‘Did you never like any sort of work?’ asked Anthea, severely.
‘Lor’, lumme, yes,’ he answered, ‘gardening was my ‘obby, so it was. But father died afore ‘e could bind me to a nurseryman, an’—’
‘We’ll take you to the sunny southern shore,’ said Jane; ‘you’ve no idea what the flowers are like.’
‘Our old cook’s there,’ said Anthea. ‘She’s queen—’
‘Oh, chuck it,’ the burglar whispered, clutching at his head with both hands. ‘I knowed the first minute I see them cats and that cow as it was a judgement on me. I don’t know now whether I’m a-standing on my hat or my boots, so help me I don’t. If you CAN get me out, get me, and if you can’t, get along with you for goodness’ sake, and give me a chanst to think about what’ll be most likely to go down with the Beak in the morning.’
‘Come on to the carpet, then,’ said Anthea, gently shoving. The others quietly pulled, and the moment the feet of the burglar were planted on the carpet Anthea wished:
‘I wish we were all on the sunny southern shore where cook is.’
And instantly they were. There were the rainbow sands, the tropic glories of leaf and flower, and there, of course, was the cook, crowned with white flowers, and with all the wrinkles of crossness and tiredness and hard work wiped out of her face.
‘Why, cook, you’re quite pretty!’ Anthea said, as soon as she had got her breath after the tumble-rush-whirl of the carpet. The burglar stood rubbing his eyes in the brilliant tropic sunlight, and gazing wildly round him on the vivid hues of the tropic land.
‘Penny plain and tuppence coloured!’ he exclaimed pensively, ‘and well worth any tuppence, however hard-earned.’
The cook was seated on a grassy mound with her court of copper-coloured savages around her. The burglar pointed a grimy finger at these.
‘Are they tame?’ he asked anxiously. ‘Do they bite or scratch, or do anything to yer with poisoned arrows or oyster shells or that?’
‘Don’t you be so timid,’ said the cook. ‘Look’e ‘ere, this ‘ere’s only a dream what you’ve come into, an’ as it’s only a dream there’s no nonsense about what a young lady like me ought to say or not, so I’ll say you’re the best-looking fellow I’ve seen this many a day. And the dream goes on and on, seemingly, as long as you behaves. The things what you has to eat and drink tastes just as good as real ones, and—’
‘Look ‘ere,’ said the burglar, ‘I’ve come ‘ere straight outer the pleece station. These ‘ere kids’ll tell you it ain’t no blame er mine.’
‘Well, you WERE a burglar, you know,’ said the truthful Anthea gently.
‘Only because I was druv to it by dishonest blokes, as well you knows, miss,’ rejoined the criminal. ‘Blowed if this ain’t the ‘ottest January as I’ve known for years.’
‘Wouldn’t you like a bath?’ asked the queen, ‘and some white clothes like me?’
‘I should only look a juggins in ‘em, miss, thanking you all the same,’ was the reply; ‘but a bath I wouldn’t resist, and my shirt was only clean on week before last.’
Cyril and Robert led him to a rocky pool, where he bathed luxuriously. Then, in shirt and trousers he sat on the sand and spoke.
‘That cook, or queen, or whatever you call her—her with the white bokay on her ‘ed—she’s my sort. Wonder if she’d keep company!’
‘I should ask her.’
‘I was always a quick hitter,’ the man went on; ‘it’s a word and a blow with me. I will.’
In shirt and trousers, and crowned with a scented flowery wreath which Cyril hastily wove as they returned to the court of the queen, the burglar stood before the cook and spoke.
‘Look ‘ere, miss,’ he said. ‘You an’ me being’ all forlorn-like, both on us, in this ‘ere dream, or whatever you calls it, I’d like to tell you straight as I likes yer looks.’
The cook smiled and looked down bashfully.
‘I’m a single man—what you might call a batcheldore. I’m mild in my ‘abits, which these kids’ll tell you the same, and I’d like to ‘ave the pleasure of walkin’ out with you next Sunday.’
‘Lor!’ said the queen cook, ‘’ow sudden you are, mister.’
‘Walking out means you’re going to be married,’ said Anthea. ‘Why not get married and have done with it? I would.’
‘I don’t mind if I do,’ said the burglar. But the cook said—
‘No, miss. Not me, not even in a dream. I don’t say anythink ag’in the young chap’s looks, but I always swore I’d be married in church, if at all—and, anyway, I don’t believe these here savages would know how to keep a registering office, even if I was to show them. No, mister, thanking you kindly, if you can’t bring a clergyman into the dream I’ll live and die like what I am.’
‘Will you marry her if we get a clergyman?’ asked the match-making Anthea.
‘I’m agreeable, miss, I’m sure,’ said he, pulling his wreath straight. ‘’Ow this ‘ere bokay do tiddle a chap’s ears to be sure!’
So, very hurriedly, the carpet was spread out, and instructed to fetch a clergyman. The instructions were written on the inside of Cyril’s cap with a piece of billiard chalk Robert had got from the marker at the hotel at Lyndhurst. The carpet disappeared, and more quickly than you would have thought possible it came back, bearing on its bosom the Reverend Septimus Blenkinsop.
The Reverend Septimus was rather a nice young man, but very much mazed and muddled, because when he saw a strange carpet laid out at his feet, in his own study, he naturally walked on it to examine it more closely. And he happened to stand on one of the thin places that Jane and Anthea had darned, so that he was half on wishing carpet and half on plain Scotch heather-mixture fingering, which has no magic properties at all.
The effect of this was that he was only half there—so that the children could just see through him, as though he had been a ghost. And as for him, he saw the sunny southern shore, the cook and the burglar and the children quite plainly; but through them all he saw, quite plainly also, his study at home, with the books and the pictures and the marble clock that had been presented to him when he left his last situation.
He seemed to himself to be in a sort of insane fit, so that it did not matter what he did—and he married the burglar to the cook. The cook said that she would rather have had a solider kind of a clergyman, one that you couldn’t see through so plain, but perhaps this was real enough for a dream.
And of course the clergyman, though misty, was really real, and able to marry people, and he did. When the ceremony was over the clergyman wandered about the island collecting botanical specimens, for he was a great botanist, and the ruling passion was strong even in an insane fit.
There was a splendid wedding feast. Can you fancy Jane and Anthea, and Robert and Cyril, dancing merrily in a ring, hand-in-hand with copper-coloured savages, round the happy couple, the queen cook and the burglar consort? There were more flowers gathered and thrown than you have ever even dreamed of, and before the children took carpet for home the now married-and-settled burglar made a speech.
‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ he said, ‘and savages of both kinds, only I know you can’t understand what I’m a saying of, but we’ll let that pass. If this is a dream, I’m on. If it ain’t, I’m onner than ever. If it’s betwixt and between—well, I’m honest, and I can’t say more. I don’t want no more ‘igh London society—I’ve got some one to put my arm around of; and I’ve got the whole lot of this ‘ere island for my allotment, and if I don’t grow some broccoli as’ll open the judge’s eye at the cottage flower shows, well, strike me pink! All I ask is, as these young gents and ladies’ll bring some parsley seed into the dream, and a penn’orth of radish seed, and threepenn’orth of onion, and I wouldn’t mind goin’ to fourpence or fippence for mixed kale, only I ain’t got a brown, so I don’t deceive you. And there’s one thing more, you might take away the parson. I don’t like things what I can see ‘alf through, so here’s how!’ He drained a coconut-shell of palm wine.
It was now past midnight—though it was tea-time on the island.
With all good wishes the children took their leave. They also collected the clergyman and took him back to his study and his presentation clock.
The Phoenix kindly carried the seeds next day to the burglar and his bride, and returned with the most satisfactory news of the happy pair.
‘He’s made a wooden spade and started on his allotment,’ it said, ‘and she is weaving him a shirt and trousers of the most radiant whiteness.’
The police never knew how the burglar got away. In Kentish Town Police Station his escape is still spoken of with bated breath as the Persian mystery.
As for the Reverend Septimus Blenkinsop, he felt that he had had a very insane fit indeed, and he was sure it was due to over-study. So he planned a little dissipation, and took his two maiden aunts to Paris, where they enjoyed a dazzling round of museums and picture galleries, and came back feeling that they had indeed seen life. He never told his aunts or any one else about the marriage on the island—because no one likes it to be generally known if he has had insane fits, however interesting and unusual.
Jane sang this simple song directly after breakfast, and the Phoenix shed crystal tears of affectionate sympathy.
‘How beautiful,’ it said, ‘is filial devotion!’
‘She won’t be home till past bedtime, though,’ said Robert. ‘We might have one more carpet-day.’
He was glad that mother was coming home—quite glad, very glad; but at the same time that gladness was rudely contradicted by a quite strong feeling of sorrow, because now they could not go out all day on the carpet.
‘I do wish we could go and get something nice for mother, only she’d want to know where we got it,’ said Anthea. ‘And she’d never, never believe it, the truth. People never do, somehow, if it’s at all interesting.’
‘I’ll tell you what,’ said Robert. ‘Suppose we wished the carpet to take us somewhere where we could find a purse with money in it—then we could buy her something.’
‘Suppose it took us somewhere foreign, and the purse was covered with strange Eastern devices, embroidered in rich silks, and full of money that wasn’t money at all here, only foreign curiosities, then we couldn’t spend it, and people would bother about where we got it, and we shouldn’t know how on earth to get out of it at all.’
Cyril moved the table off the carpet as he spoke, and its leg caught in one of Anthea’s darns and ripped away most of it, as well as a large slit in the carpet.
‘Well, now you HAVE done it,’ said Robert.
But Anthea was a really first-class sister. She did not say a word till she had got out the Scotch heather-mixture fingering wool and the darning-needle and the thimble and the scissors, and by that time she had been able to get the better of her natural wish to be thoroughly disagreeable, and was able to say quite kindly—
‘Never mind, Squirrel, I’ll soon mend it.’
Cyril thumped her on the back. He understood exactly how she had felt, and he was not an ungrateful brother.
‘Respecting the purse containing coins,’ the Phoenix said, scratching its invisible ear thoughtfully with its shining claw, ‘it might be as well, perhaps, to state clearly the amount which you wish to find, as well as the country where you wish to find it, and the nature of the coins which you prefer. It would be indeed a cold moment when you should find a purse containing but three oboloi.’
‘How much is an oboloi?’
‘An obol is about twopence halfpenny,’ the Phoenix replied.
‘Yes,’ said Jane, ‘and if you find a purse I suppose it is only because some one has lost it, and you ought to take it to the policeman.’
‘The situation,’ remarked the Phoenix, ‘does indeed bristle with difficulties.’
‘What about a buried treasure,’ said Cyril, ‘and every one was dead that it belonged to?’
‘Mother wouldn’t believe THAT,’ said more than one voice.
‘Suppose,’ said Robert—‘suppose we asked to be taken where we could find a purse and give it back to the person it belonged to, and they would give us something for finding it?’
‘We aren’t allowed to take money from strangers. You know we aren’t, Bobs,’ said Anthea, making a knot at the end of a needleful of Scotch heather-mixture fingering wool (which is very wrong, and you must never do it when you are darning).
‘No, THAT wouldn’t do,’ said Cyril. ‘Let’s chuck it and go to the North Pole, or somewhere really interesting.’
‘No,’ said the girls together, ‘there must be SOME way.’
‘Wait a sec,’ Anthea added. ‘I’ve got an idea coming. Don’t speak.’
There was a silence as she paused with the darning-needle in the air! Suddenly she spoke:
‘I see. Let’s tell the carpet to take us somewhere where we can get the money for mother’s present, and—and—and get it some way that she’ll believe in and not think wrong.’
‘Well, I must say you are learning the way to get the most out of the carpet,’ said Cyril. He spoke more heartily and kindly than usual, because he remembered how Anthea had refrained from snarking him about tearing the carpet.
‘Yes,’ said the Phoenix, ‘you certainly are. And you have to remember that if you take a thing out it doesn’t stay in.’
No one paid any attention to this remark at the time, but afterwards every one thought of it.
‘Do hurry up, Panther,’ said Robert; and that was why Anthea did hurry up, and why the big darn in the middle of the carpet was all open and webby like a fishing net, not tight and close like woven cloth, which is what a good, well-behaved darn should be.
Then every one put on its outdoor things, the Phoenix fluttered on to the mantelpiece and arranged its golden feathers in the glass, and all was ready. Every one got on to the carpet.
‘Please go slowly, dear carpet,’ Anthea began; we like to see where we’re going.’ And then she added the difficult wish that had been decided on.
Next moment the carpet, stiff and raftlike, was sailing over the roofs of Kentish Town.
‘I wish—No, I don’t mean that. I mean it’s a PITY we aren’t higher up,’ said Anthea, as the edge of the carpet grazed a chimney-pot.
‘That’s right. Be careful,’ said the Phoenix, in warning tones. ‘If you wish when you’re on a wishing carpet, you DO wish, and there’s an end of it.’
So for a short time no one spoke, and the carpet sailed on in calm magnificence over St Pancras and King’s Cross stations and over the crowded streets of Clerkenwell.
‘We’re going out Greenwich way,’ said Cyril, as they crossed the streak of rough, tumbled water that was the Thames. ‘We might go and have a look at the Palace.’
On and on the carpet swept, still keeping much nearer to the chimney-pots than the children found at all comfortable. And then, just over New Cross, a terrible thing happened.
Jane and Robert were in the middle of the carpet. Part of them was on the carpet, and part of them—the heaviest part—was on the great central darn.
‘It’s all very misty,’ said Jane; ‘it looks partly like out of doors and partly like in the nursery at home. I feel as if I was going to have measles; everything looked awfully rum then, remember.’
‘I feel just exactly the same,’ Robert said.
‘It’s the hole,’ said the Phoenix; ‘it’s not measles whatever that possession may be.’
And at that both Robert and Jane suddenly, and at once, made a bound to try and get on to the safer part of the carpet, and the darn gave way and their boots went up, and the heavy heads and bodies of them went down through the hole, and they landed in a position something between sitting and sprawling on the flat leads on the top of a high, grey, gloomy, respectable house whose address was 705, Amersham Road, New Cross.
The carpet seemed to awaken to new energy as soon as it had got rid of their weight, and it rose high in the air. The others lay down flat and peeped over the edge of the rising carpet.
‘Are you hurt?’ cried Cyril, and Robert shouted ‘No,’ and next moment the carpet had sped away, and Jane and Robert were hidden from the sight of the others by a stack of smoky chimneys.
‘Oh, how awful!’ said Anthea.
‘It might have been worse,’ said the Phoenix. ‘What would have been the sentiments of the survivors if that darn had given way when we were crossing the river?’
‘Yes, there’s that,’ said Cyril, recovering himself. ‘They’ll be all right. They’ll howl till some one gets them down, or drop tiles into the front garden to attract attention of passersby. Bobs has got my one-and-fivepence—lucky you forgot to mend that hole in my pocket, Panther, or he wouldn’t have had it. They can tram it home.’
But Anthea would not be comforted.
‘It’s all my fault,’ she said. ‘I KNEW the proper way to darn, and I didn’t do it. It’s all my fault. Let’s go home and patch the carpet with your Etons—something really strong—and send it to fetch them.’
‘All right,’ said Cyril; ‘but your Sunday jacket is stronger than my Etons. We must just chuck mother’s present, that’s all. I wish—’
‘Stop!’ cried the Phoenix; ‘the carpet is dropping to earth.’
And indeed it was.
It sank swiftly, yet steadily, and landed on the pavement of the Deptford Road. It tipped a little as it landed, so that Cyril and Anthea naturally walked off it, and in an instant it had rolled itself up and hidden behind a gate-post. It did this so quickly that not a single person in the Deptford Road noticed it. The Phoenix rustled its way into the breast of Cyril’s coat, and almost at the same moment a well-known voice remarked—
‘Well, I never! What on earth are you doing here?’
They were face to face with their pet uncle—their Uncle Reginald.
‘We DID think of going to Greenwich Palace and talking about Nelson,’ said Cyril, telling as much of the truth as he thought his uncle could believe.
‘And where are the others?’ asked Uncle Reginald.
‘I don’t exactly know,’ Cyril replied, this time quite truthfully.
‘Well,’ said Uncle Reginald, ‘I must fly. I’ve a case in the County Court. That’s the worst of being a beastly solicitor. One can’t take the chances of life when one gets them. If only I could come with you to the Painted Hall and give you lunch at the “Ship” afterwards! But, alas! it may not be.’
The uncle felt in his pocket.
‘I mustn’t enjoy myself,’ he said, ‘but that’s no reason why you shouldn’t. Here, divide this by four, and the product ought to give you some desired result. Take care of yourselves. Adieu.’
And waving a cheery farewell with his neat umbrella, the good and high-hatted uncle passed away, leaving Cyril and Anthea to exchange eloquent glances over the shining golden sovereign that lay in Cyril’s hand.
‘Well!’ said Anthea.
‘Well!’ said Cyril.
‘Well!’ said the Phoenix.
‘Good old carpet!’ said Cyril, joyously.
‘It WAS clever of it—so adequate and yet so simple,’ said the Phoenix, with calm approval.
‘Oh, come on home and let’s mend the carpet. I am a beast. I’d forgotten the others just for a minute,’ said the conscience-stricken Anthea.
They unrolled the carpet quickly and slyly—they did not want to attract public attention—and the moment their feet were on the carpet Anthea wished to be at home, and instantly they were.
The kindness of their excellent uncle had made it unnecessary for them to go to such extremes as Cyril’s Etons or Anthea’s Sunday jacket for the patching of the carpet.
Anthea set to work at once to draw the edges of the broken darn together, and Cyril hastily went out and bought a large piece of the marble-patterned American oil-cloth which careful house-wives use to cover dressers and kitchen tables. It was the strongest thing he could think of.
Then they set to work to line the carpet throughout with the oil-cloth. The nursery felt very odd and empty without the others, and Cyril did not feel so sure as he had done about their being able to ‘tram it’ home. So he tried to help Anthea, which was very good of him, but not much use to her.
The Phoenix watched them for a time, but it was plainly growing more and more restless. It fluffed up its splendid feathers, and stood first on one gilded claw and then on the other, and at last it said—
‘I can bear it no longer. This suspense! My Robert—who set my egg to hatch—in the bosom of whose Norfolk raiment I have nestled so often and so pleasantly! I think, if you’ll excuse me—’
‘Yes—DO,’ cried Anthea, ‘I wish we’d thought of asking you before.’
Cyril opened the window. The Phoenix flapped its sunbright wings and vanished.
‘So THAT’S all right,’ said Cyril, taking up his needle and instantly pricking his hand in a new place.
Of course I know that what you have really wanted to know about all this time is not what Anthea and Cyril did, but what happened to Jane and Robert after they fell through the carpet on to the leads of the house which was called number 705, Amersham Road.
But I had to tell you the other first. That is one of the most annoying things about stories, you cannot tell all the different parts of them at the same time.
Robert’s first remark when he found himself seated on the damp, cold, sooty leads was—
‘Here’s a go!’
Jane’s first act was tears.
‘Dry up, Pussy; don’t be a little duffer,’ said her brother, kindly, ‘it’ll be all right.’
And then he looked about, just as Cyril had known he would, for something to throw down, so as to attract the attention of the wayfarers far below in the street. He could not find anything. Curiously enough, there were no stones on the leads, not even a loose tile. The roof was of slate, and every single slate knew its place and kept it. But, as so often happens, in looking for one thing he found another. There was a trap-door leading down into the house.
And that trap-door was not fastened.
‘Stop snivelling and come here, Jane,’ he cried, encouragingly. ‘Lend a hand to heave this up. If we can get into the house, we might sneak down without meeting any one, with luck. Come on.’
They heaved up the door till it stood straight up, and, as they bent to look into the hole below, the door fell back with a hollow clang on the leads behind, and with its noise was mingled a blood-curdling scream from underneath.
‘Discovered!’ hissed Robert. ‘Oh, my cats alive!’
They were indeed discovered.
They found themselves looking down into an attic, which was also a lumber-room. It had boxes and broken chairs, old fenders and picture-frames, and rag-bags hanging from nails.
In the middle of the floor was a box, open, half full of clothes. Other clothes lay on the floor in neat piles. In the middle of the piles of clothes sat a lady, very fat indeed, with her feet sticking out straight in front of her. And it was she who had screamed, and who, in fact, was still screaming.
‘Don’t!’ cried Jane, ‘please don’t! We won’t hurt you.’
‘Where are the rest of your gang?’ asked the lady, stopping short in the middle of a scream.
‘The others have gone on, on the wishing carpet,’ said Jane truthfully.
‘The wishing carpet?’ said the lady.
‘Yes,’ said Jane, before Robert could say ‘You shut up!’ ‘You must have read about it. The Phoenix is with them.’
Then the lady got up, and picking her way carefully between the piles of clothes she got to the door and through it. She shut it behind her, and the two children could hear her calling ‘Septimus! Septimus!’ in a loud yet frightened way.
‘Now,’ said Robert quickly; ‘I’ll drop first.’
He hung by his hands and dropped through the trap-door.
‘Now you. Hang by your hands. I’ll catch you. Oh, there’s no time for jaw. Drop, I say.’
Jane dropped.
Robert tried to catch her, and even before they had finished the breathless roll among the piles of clothes, which was what his catching ended in, he whispered—
‘We’ll hide—behind those fenders and things; they’ll think we’ve gone along the roofs. Then, when all is calm, we’ll creep down the stairs and take our chance.’
They hastily hid. A corner of an iron bedstead stuck into Robert’s side, and Jane had only standing room for one foot—but they bore it—and when the lady came back, not with Septimus, but with another lady, they held their breath and their hearts beat thickly.
‘Gone!’ said the first lady; ‘poor little things—quite mad, my dear—and at large! We must lock this room and send for the police.’
‘Let me look out,’ said the second lady, who was, if possible, older and thinner and primmer than the first. So the two ladies dragged a box under the trap-door and put another box on the top of it, and then they both climbed up very carefully and put their two trim, tidy heads out of the trap-door to look for the ‘mad children’.
‘Now,’ whispered Robert, getting the bedstead leg out of his side.
They managed to creep out from their hiding-place and out through the door before the two ladies had done looking out of the trap-door on to the empty leads.
Robert and Jane tiptoed down the stairs—one flight, two flights. Then they looked over the banisters. Horror! a servant was coming up with a loaded scuttle.
The children with one consent crept swiftly through the first open door.
The room was a study, calm and gentlemanly, with rows of books, a writing table, and a pair of embroidered slippers warming themselves in the fender. The children hid behind the window-curtains. As they passed the table they saw on it a missionary-box with its bottom label torn off, open and empty.
‘Oh, how awful!’ whispered Jane. ‘We shall never get away alive.’
‘Hush!’ said Robert, not a moment too soon, for there were steps on the stairs, and next instant the two ladies came into the room. They did not see the children, but they saw the empty missionary box.
‘I knew it,’ said one. ‘Selina, it WAS a gang. I was certain of it from the first. The children were not mad. They were sent to distract our attention while their confederates robbed the house.’
‘I am afraid you are right,’ said Selina; ‘and WHERE ARE THEY NOW?’
‘Downstairs, no doubt, collecting the silver milk-jug and sugar-basin and the punch-ladle that was Uncle Joe’s, and Aunt Jerusha’s teaspoons. I shall go down.’
‘Oh, don’t be so rash and heroic,’ said Selina. ‘Amelia, we must call the police from the window. Lock the door. I WILL—I will—’
The words ended in a yell as Selina, rushing to the window, came face to face with the hidden children.
‘Oh, don’t!’ said Jane; ‘how can you be so unkind? We AREN’T burglars, and we haven’t any gang, and we didn’t open your missionary-box. We opened our own once, but we didn’t have to use the money, so our consciences made us put it back and—DON’T! Oh, I wish you wouldn’t—’
Miss Selina had seized Jane and Miss Amelia captured Robert. The children found themselves held fast by strong, slim hands, pink at the wrists and white at the knuckles.
‘We’ve got YOU, at any rate,’ said Miss Amelia. ‘Selina, your captive is smaller than mine. You open the window at once and call “Murder!” as loud as you can.
Selina obeyed; but when she had opened the window, instead of calling ‘Murder!’ she called ‘Septimus!’ because at that very moment she saw her nephew coming in at the gate.
In another minute he had let himself in with his latch-key and had mounted the stairs. As he came into the room Jane and Robert each uttered a shriek of joy so loud and so sudden that the ladies leaped with surprise, and nearly let them go.
‘It’s our own clergyman,’ cried Jane.
‘Don’t you remember us?’ asked Robert. ‘You married our burglar for us—don’t you remember?’
‘I KNEW it was a gang,’ said Amelia. ‘Septimus, these abandoned children are members of a desperate burgling gang who are robbing the house. They have already forced the missionary-box and purloined its contents.’
The Reverend Septimus passed his hand wearily over his brow.
‘I feel a little faint,’ he said, ‘running upstairs so quickly.’
‘We never touched the beastly box,’ said Robert.
‘Then your confederates did,’ said Miss Selina.
‘No, no,’ said the curate, hastily. ‘I opened the box myself. This morning I found I had not enough small change for the Mothers’ Independent Unity Measles and Croup Insurance payments. I suppose this is NOT a dream, is it?’
‘Dream? No, indeed. Search the house. I insist upon it.’
The curate, still pale and trembling, searched the house, which, of course, was blamelessly free of burglars.
When he came back he sank wearily into his chair.
‘Aren’t you going to let us go?’ asked Robert, with furious indignation, for there is something in being held by a strong lady that sets the blood of a boy boiling in his veins with anger and despair. ‘We’ve never done anything to you. It’s all the carpet. It dropped us on the leads. WE couldn’t help it. You know how it carried you over to the island, and you had to marry the burglar to the cook.’
‘Oh, my head!’ said the curate.
‘Never mind your head just now,’ said Robert; ‘try to be honest and honourable, and do your duty in that state of life!’
‘This is a judgement on me for something, I suppose,’ said the Reverend Septimus, wearily, ‘but I really cannot at the moment remember what.’
‘Send for the police,’ said Miss Selina.
‘Send for a doctor,’ said the curate.
‘Do you think they ARE mad, then,’ said Miss Amelia.
‘I think I am,’ said the curate.
Jane had been crying ever since her capture. Now she said— ‘You aren’t now, but perhaps you will be, if—And it would serve you jolly well right, too.’
‘Aunt Selina,’ said the curate, ‘and Aunt Amelia, believe me, this is only an insane dream. You will realize it soon. It has happened to me before. But do not let us be unjust, even in a dream. Do not hold the children; they have done no harm. As I said before, it was I who opened the box.’
The strong, bony hands unwillingly loosened their grasp. Robert shook himself and stood in sulky resentment. But Jane ran to the curate and embraced him so suddenly that he had not time to defend himself.
‘You’re a dear,’ she said. ‘It IS like a dream just at first, but you get used to it. Now DO let us go. There’s a good, kind, honourable clergyman.’
‘I don’t know,’ said the Reverend Septimus; ‘it’s a difficult problem. It is such a very unusual dream. Perhaps it’s only a sort of other life—quite real enough for you to be mad in. And if you’re mad, there might be a dream-asylum where you’d be kindly treated, and in time restored, cured, to your sorrowing relatives. It is very hard to see your duty plainly, even in ordinary life, and these dream-circumstances are so complicated—’
‘If it’s a dream,’ said Robert, ‘you will wake up directly, and then you’d be sorry if you’d sent us into a dream-asylum, because you might never get into the same dream again and let us out, and so we might stay there for ever, and then what about our sorrowing relatives who aren’t in the dreams at all?’
But all the curate could now say was, ‘Oh, my head!’
And Jane and Robert felt quite ill with helplessness and hopelessness. A really conscientious curate is a very difficult thing to manage.
And then, just as the hopelessness and the helplessness were getting to be almost more than they could bear, the two children suddenly felt that extraordinary shrinking feeling that you always have when you are just going to vanish. And the next moment they had vanished, and the Reverend Septimus was left alone with his aunts.
‘I knew it was a dream,’ he cried, wildly. ‘I’ve had something like it before. Did you dream it too, Aunt Selina, and you, Aunt Amelia? I dreamed that you did, you know.’
Aunt Selina looked at him and then at Aunt Amelia. Then she said boldly—
‘What do you mean? WE haven’t been dreaming anything. You must have dropped off in your chair.’
The curate heaved a sigh of relief.
‘Oh, if it’s only I,’ he said; ‘if we’d all dreamed it I could never have believed it, never!’
Afterwards Aunt Selina said to the other aunt—
‘Yes, I know it was an untruth, and I shall doubtless be punished for it in due course. But I could see the poor dear fellow’s brain giving way before my very eyes. He couldn’t have stood the strain of three dreams. It WAS odd, wasn’t it? All three of us dreaming the same thing at the same moment. We must never tell dear Seppy. But I shall send an account of it to the Psychical Society, with stars instead of names, you know.’
And she did. And you can read all about it in one of the society’s fat Blue-books.
Of course, you understand what had happened? The intelligent Phoenix had simply gone straight off to the Psammead, and had wished Robert and Jane at home. And, of course, they were at home at once. Cyril and Anthea had not half finished mending the carpet.
When the joyful emotions of reunion had calmed down a little, they all went out and spent what was left of Uncle Reginald’s sovereign in presents for mother. They bought her a pink silk handkerchief, a pair of blue and white vases, a bottle of scent, a packet of Christmas candles, and a cake of soap shaped and coloured like a tomato, and one that was so like an orange that almost any one you had given it to would have tried to peel it—if they liked oranges, of course. Also they bought a cake with icing on, and the rest of the money they spent on flowers to put in the vases.
When they had arranged all the things on a table, with the candles stuck up on a plate ready to light the moment mother’s cab was heard, they washed themselves thoroughly and put on tidier clothes.
Then Robert said, ‘Good old Psammead,’ and the others said so too.
‘But, really, it’s just as much good old Phoenix,’ said Robert. ‘Suppose it hadn’t thought of getting the wish!’
‘Ah!’ said the Phoenix, ‘it is perhaps fortunate for you that I am such a competent bird.’
‘There’s mother’s cab,’ cried Anthea, and the Phoenix hid and they lighted the candles, and next moment mother was home again.
She liked her presents very much, and found their story of Uncle Reginald and the sovereign easy and even pleasant to believe.
‘Good old carpet,’ were Cyril’s last sleepy words.
‘What there is of it,’ said the Phoenix, from the cornice-pole.