The E. Nesbit Megapack: 26 Classic Novels and Stories (32 page)

But those painted wooden foods adhering firmly to their dishes were the kind of food of which the banquet now offered to Philip and Lucy was composed. Only they had more dishes than I had. They had as well a turkey, eight raspberry jam tarts, a pine-apple, a melon, a dish of oysters in the shell, a piece of boiled bacon and a leg of mutton. But all were equally wooden and uneatable.

Philip and Lucy, growing hungrier and hungrier, pretended with sinking hearts to eat and enjoy the wooden feast. Wine was served in those little goblets which they knew so well, where the double glasses restrained and contained a red fluid which
looked
like wine. They did not want wine, but they were thirsty as well as hungry.

Philip wondered what the waiters were. He had plenty of time to wonder while the long banquet went on. It was not till he saw a group of them standing stiffly together at the end of the hall that he knew they must be the matches with which he had once peopled a city, no other inhabitants being at hand.

When all the dishes had been handed, speeches happened.

“Friends and fellow-citizens,” Mr. Noah began, and went on to say how brave and clever Sir Philip was, and how likely it was that he would turn out to be the Deliverer. Philip did not hear all this speech. He was thinking of things to eat.

Then every one in the hall stood and shouted, and Philip found that he was expected to take his turn at speech-making. He stood up trembling and wretched.

“Friends and fellow-citizens,” he said, “thank you very much. I want to be the Deliverer, but I don’t know if I can,” and sat down again amid roars of applause.

Then there was music, from a grated gallery. And then—I cannot begin to tell you how glad Lucy and Philip were—Mr. Noah said, once more in a whisper, “Cheer up! the banquet is over.
Now
we’ll have tea.”

“Tea” turned out to be bread and milk in a very cosy, blue-silk-lined room opening out of the banqueting-hall. Only Lucy, Philip and Mr. Noah were present. Bread and milk is very good even when you have to eat it with the leaden spoons out of the dolls’-house basket. When it was much later Mr. Noah suddenly said “good-night,” and in a maze of sleepy repletion (look that up in the dicker, will you?) the children went to bed. Philip’s bed was of gold with yellow satin curtains, and Lucy’s was made of silver, with curtains of silk that were white. But the metals and colours made no difference to their deep and dreamless sleep.

And in the morning there was bread and milk again, and the two of them had it in the blue room without Mr. Noah.

“Well,” said Lucy, looking up from the bowl of white floating cubes, “do you think you’re getting to like me any better?”

“
No
,” said Philip, brief and stern like the skipper in the song.

“I wish you would,” said Lucy.

“Well, I can’t,” said Philip; “but I do want to say one thing. I’m sorry I bunked and left you. And I did come back.”

“I know you did,” said Lucy.

“I came back to fetch you,” said Philip, “and now we’d better get along home.”

“You’ve got to do seven deeds of power before you can get home,” said Lucy.

“Oh! I remember, Perrin told me,” said he.

“Well,” Lucy went on, “that’ll take ages. No one can go out of this place
twice
unless he’s a King-Deliverer. You’ve gone out
once
—without
me
. Before you can go again you’ve got to do seven noble deeds.”

“I killed the dragon,” said Philip, modestly proud.

“That’s only one,” she said; “there are six more.” And she ate bread and milk with firmness.

“Do you like this adventure?” he asked abruptly.

“It’s more interesting than anything that ever happened to me,” she said. “If you were nice I should like it awfully. But as it is—”

“I’m sorry you don’t think I’m nice,” said he.

“Well, what do
you
think?” she said.

Philip reflected. He did not want not to be nice. None of us do. Though you might not think it to see how some of us behave. True politeness, he remembered having been told, consists in showing an interest in other people’s affairs.

“Tell me,” he said, very much wishing to be polite and nice. “Tell me what happened after I—after I—after you didn’t come down the ladder with me.”

“Alone and deserted,” Lucy answered promptly, “my sworn friend having hooked it and left me, I fell down, and both my hands were full of gravel, and the fierce soldiery surrounded me.”

“I thought you were coming just behind me,” said Philip, frowning.

“Well, I wasn’t.”

“And then.”

“Well, then— You
were
silly not to stay. They surrounded me—the soldiers, I mean—and the captain said, ‘Tell me the truth. Are you a Destroyer or a Deliverer?’ So, of course, I said I wasn’t a destroyer, whatever I was; and then they took me to the palace and said I could be a Princess till the Deliverer King turned up. They said,” she giggled gaily, “that my hair was the hair of a Deliverer and not of a Destroyer, and I’ve been most awfully happy ever since. Have you?”

“No,” said Philip, remembering the miserable feeling of having been a coward and a sneak that had come upon him when he found that he had saved his own skin and left Lucy alone in an unknown and dangerous world; “not exactly happy, I shouldn’t call it.”

“It’s beautiful being a Princess,” said Lucy. “I wonder what your next noble deed will be. I wonder whether I could help you with it?” She looked wistfully at him.

“If I’m going to do noble deeds I’ll do them. I don’t want any help, thank you, especially from girls,” he answered.

“I wish you did,” said Lucy, and finished her bread and milk.

Philip’s bowl also was empty. He stretched arms and legs and neck.

“It is rum,” he said; “before this began I never thought a thing like this
could
begin, did you?”

“I don’t know,” she said, “everything’s very wonderful. I’ve always been expecting things to be more wonderful than they ever have been. You get sort of hints and nudges, you know. Fairy tales—yes, and dreams, you can’t help feeling they must mean
something
. And your sister and my daddy; the two of them being such friends when they were little, and then parted and then getting friends again;—
that’s
like a story in a dream, isn’t it? And your building the city and me helping. And my daddy being such a dear darling and your sister being such a darling dear. It did make me think beautiful things were sort of likely. Didn’t it you?”

“No,” said Philip; “I mean yes,” he said, and he was in that moment nearer to liking Lucy than he had ever been before; “everything’s very wonderful, isn’t it?”

“Ahem!” said a respectful cough behind them.

They turned to meet the calm gaze of Double-six.

“If you’ve quite finished breakfast, Sir Philip,” he said, “Mr. Noah would be pleased to see you in his office.”

“Me too?” said Lucy, before Philip could say, “Only me, I suppose?”

“You may come too, if you wish it, your Highness,” said Double-six, bowing stiffly.

They found Mr. Noah very busy in a little room littered with papers; he was sitting at a table writing.

“Good-morning, Princess,” he said, “good-morning, Sir Philip. You see me very busy. I am trying to arrange for your next labour.”

“Do you mean my next deed of valour?” Philip asked.

“We have decided that all your deeds need not be deeds of valour,” said Mr. Noah, fiddling with a pen. “The strange labours of Hercules, you remember, were some of them dangerous and some merely difficult. I have decided that difficult things shall count. There are several things that really
need
doing,” he went on half to himself. “There’s the fruit supply, and the Dwellers by the sea, and— But that must wait. We try to give you as much variety as possible. Yesterday’s was an out-door adventure. Today’s shall be an indoor amusement. I say today’s but I confess that I think it not unlikely that the task I am now about to set the candidate for the post of King-Deliverer, the task, I say, which I am now about to set you, may, quite possibly, occupy some days, if not weeks of your valuable time.”

“But our people at home,” said Philip. “It isn’t that I’m afraid, really and truly it isn’t, but they’ll go out of their minds, not knowing what’s become of us. Oh, Mr. Noah! do let us go back.”

“It’s all right,” said Mr. Noah. “However long you stay here time won’t move with them. I thought I’d explained that to you.”

“But you said—”

“I said you’d set our clocks to the time of
your
world when you deserted your little friend. But when you had come back for her, and rescued her from the dragon, the clocks went their own time again. There’s only just that time missing that happened between your coming here the second time and your killing the dragon.”

“I see,” said Philip. But he didn’t. I only hope
you
do.

“You can take your time about this new job,” said Mr. Noah, “and you may get any help you like. I shan’t consider you’ve failed till you’ve been at it three months. After that the Pretenderette would be entitled to
her
chance.”

“If you’re quite sure that the time here doesn’t count at home,” said Philip, “what is it, please, that we’ve got to do?”

“The greatest intellects of our country have for many ages occupied themselves with the problem which you are now asked to solve,” said Mr. Noah. “Your late gaoler, Mr. Bacon-Shakespeare, has written no less than twenty-seven volumes, all in cypher, on this very subject. But as he has forgotten what cypher he used, and no one else ever knew it, his volumes are of but little use to us.”

“I see,” said Philip. And again he didn’t.

Mr. Noah rose to his full height, and when he stood up the children looked very small beside him.

“Now,” he said, “I will tell you what it is that you must do. I should like to decree that your second labour should be the tidying up of this room—
all
these papers are prophecies relating to the Deliverer—but it is one of our laws that the judge must not use any public matter for his own personal benefit. So I have decided that the next labour shall be the disentangling of the Mazy Carpet. It is in the Pillared Hall of Public Amusements. I will get my hat and we will go there at once. I can tell you about it as we go.”

And as they went down streets and past houses and palaces all of which Philip could now dimly remember to have built at some time or other, Mr. Noah went on:

“It is a very beautiful hall, but we have never been able to use it for public amusement or anything else. The giant who originally built this city placed in this hall a carpet so thick that it rises to your knees, and so intricately woven that none can disentangle it. It is far too thick to pass through any of the doors. It is your task to remove it.”

“Why that’s as easy as easy,” said Philip. “I’ll cut it in bits and bring out a bit at a time.”

“That would be most unfortunate for you,” said Mr. Noah. “I filed only this morning a very ancient prophecy:

“He who shall the carpet sever,

By fire or flint or steel,

Shall be fed on orange pips for ever,

And dressed in orange peel.

You wouldn’t like that, you know.”

“No,” said Philip grimly, “I certainly shouldn’t.”

“The carpet must be
unravelled
, unwoven, so that not a thread is broken. Here is the hall.”

They went up steps—Philip sometimes wished he had not been so fond of building steps—and through a dark vestibule to an arched door. Looking through it they saw a great hall and at its end a raised space, more steps, and two enormous pillars of bronze wrought in relief with figures of flying birds.

“Father’s Japanese vases,” Lucy whispered.

The floor of the room was covered by the carpet. It was loosely but difficultly woven of very thick soft rope of a red colour. When I say difficultly, I mean that it wasn’t just straight-forward in the weaving, but the threads went over and under and round about in such a determined and bewildering way that Philip felt—and said—that he would rather untie the string of a hundred of the most difficult parcels than tackle this.

“Well,” said Mr. Noah, “I leave you to it. Board and lodging will be provided at the Provisional Palace where you slept last night. All citizens are bound to assist when called upon. Dinner is at one.
Good
-morning!”

Philip sat down in the dark archway and gazed helplessly at the twisted strands of the carpet. After a moment of hesitation Lucy sat down too, clasped her arms round her knees, and she also gazed at the carpet. They had all the appearance of shipwrecked mariners looking out over a great sea and longing for a sail.

“Ha ha—tee hee!” said a laugh close behind them. They turned. And it was the motor-veiled lady, the hateful Pretenderette, who had crept up close behind them, and was looking down at them through her veil.

“What do you want?” said Philip severely.

“I want to laugh,” said the motor lady. “I want to laugh at
you
. And I’m going to.”

“Well go and laugh somewhere else then,” Philip suggested.

“Ah! but this is where I want to laugh. You and your carpet! You’ll never do it. You don’t know how. But
I
do.”

“Come away,” whispered Lucy, and they went. The Pretenderette followed slowly. Outside, a couple of Dutch dolls in check suits were passing, arm in arm.

“Help!” cried Lucy suddenly, and the Dutch dolls paused and took their hats off.

“What is it?” the taller doll asked, stroking his black painted moustache.

“Mr. Noah said all citizens were bound to help us,” said Lucy a little breathlessly.

“But of course,” said the shorter doll, bowing with stiff courtesy.

“Then,” said Lucy, “will you
please
take that motor person away and put her somewhere where she can’t bother till we’ve done the carpet?”

“Delighted,” exclaimed the agreeable Dutch strangers, darted up the steps and next moment emerged with the form of the Pretenderette between them, struggling indeed, but struggling vainly.

“You need not have the slightest further anxiety,” the taller Dutchman said; “dismiss the incident from your mind. We will take her to the hall of justice. Her offence is bothering people in pursuit of their duty. The sentence is imprisonment for as long as the botheree chooses. Good-morning.”

“Oh,
thank you!
” said both the children together.

When they were alone, Philip said—and it was not easy to say it:

“That was jolly clever of you, Lucy. I should never have thought of it.”