The E. Nesbit Megapack: 26 Classic Novels and Stories (28 page)

He could not hear exactly what they were saying, but he caught the words: “No.”

“Of course I’ve asked.”

“Police.”

“Telegram.”

“Yes, of course.”

“Better make quite sure.”

Then every one began speaking all at once, and you could not hear anything that anybody said. Philip was too busy keeping behind the buttress to see who they were who were talking. He was glad
something
had happened.

“Now I shall have something to think about besides the nurse and my beautiful city that she has pulled down.”

But what was it that had happened? He hoped nobody was hurt—or had done anything wrong. The word police had always made him uncomfortable ever since he had seen a boy no bigger than himself pulled along the road by a very large policeman. The boy had stolen a loaf, Philip was told. Philip could never forget that boy’s face; he always thought of it in church when it said “prisoners and captives,” and still more when it said “desolate and oppressed.”

“I do hope it’s not
that
,” he said.

And slowly he got himself to leave the shelter of the red-brick buttress and to follow to the house those voices and those footsteps that had gone by him.

He followed the sound of them to the kitchen. The cook was there in tears and a Windsor arm-chair. The kitchen-maid, her cap all on one side, was crying down most dirty cheeks. The coachman was there, very red in the face, and the groom, without his gaiters. The nurse was there, neat as ever she seemed at first, but Philip was delighted when a more careful inspection showed him that there was mud on her large shoes and on the bottom of her skirt, and that her dress had a large three-cornered tear in it.

“I wouldn’t have had it happen for a twenty-pun note,” the coachman was saying.

“George,” said the nurse to the groom, “you go and get a horse ready. I’ll write the telegram.”

“You’d best take Peppermint,” said the coachman. “She’s the fastest.”

The groom went out, saying under his breath, “Teach your grandmother,” which Philip thought rude and unmeaning.

Philip was standing unnoticed by the door. He felt that thrill—if it isn’t pleasure it is more like it than anything else—which we all feel when something real has happened.

But what
had
happened. What?

“I wish I’d never come back,” said the nurse. “Then nobody could pretend it was
my
fault.”

“It don’t matter what they pretend,” the cook stopped crying to say. “The thing is what’s happened. Oh, my goodness. I’d rather have been turned away without a character than have had this happen.”

“And I’d rather
any
thing,” said the nurse. “Oh, my goodness me. I wish I’d never been born.”

And then and there, before the astonished eyes of Philip, she began to behave as any nice person might—she began to cry.

“It wouldn’t have happened,” said the cook, “if the master hadn’t been away. He’s a Justice of the Peace, he is, and a terror to gypsies. It wouldn’t never have happened if—”

Philip could not bear it any longer.

“
What
wouldn’t have happened if?” he asked, startling everybody to a quick jump of surprise.

The nurse stopped crying and turned to look at him.

“Oh,
you!
” she said slowly. “I forgot
you
. You want your breakfast, I suppose, no matter what’s happened?”

“No, I don’t,” said Philip, with extreme truth. “I want to know what
has
happened?”

“Miss Lucy’s lost,” said the cook heavily, “that’s what’s happened. So now you know. You run along and play, like a good little boy, and don’t make extry trouble for us in the trouble we’re in.”

“Lost?” repeated Philip.

“Yes, lost. I expect you’re glad,” said the nurse, “the way you treated her. You hold your tongue and don’t let me so much as hear you breathe the next twenty-four hours. I’ll go and write that telegram.”

Philip thought it best not to let any one hear him breathe. By this means he heard the telegram when nurse read it aloud to the cook.

Peter Graham, Esq.,

Hotel Wagram,

Brussels.

Miss Lucy lost. Please come home immediately.

Philkins.

That’s all right, isn’t it?”

“I don’t see why you sign it Philkins. You’re only the nurse—I’m the head of the house when the family’s away, and my name’s Bobson,” the cook said.

There was a sound of torn paper.

“There—the paper’s tore. I’d just as soon your name went to it,” said the nurse. “I don’t want to be the one to tell such news.”

“Oh, my good gracious, what a thing to happen,” sighed the cook. “Poor little darling!”

Then somebody wrote the telegram again, and the nurse took it out to the stable-yard, where Peppermint was already saddled.

“I thought,” said Philip, bold in the nurse’s absence, “I thought Lucy was with her aunt.”

“She came back yesterday,” said the cook. “Yes, after you’d gone to bed. And this morning that nurse went into the night nursery and she wasn’t there. Her bed all empty and cold, and her clothes gone. Though how the gypsies could have got in without waking that nurse is a mystery to me and ever will be. She must sleep like a pig.”

“Or the seven sleepers,” said the coachman.

“But what would gypsies want her
for?
” Philip asked.

“What do they ever want anybody for?” retorted the cook. “Look at the heirs that’s been stolen. I don’t suppose there’s a titled family in England but what’s had its heir stolen, one time and another.”

“I suppose you’ve looked all over the house,” said Philip.

“I suppose we ain’t deaf and dumb and blind and silly,” said the cook. “Here’s that nurse. You be off, Mr. Philip, without you want a flea in your ear.”

And Philip, at the word,
was
off. He went into the long drawing-room, and shut the door. Then he got the ivory chessmen out of the Buhl cabinet, and set them out on that delightful chess-table whose chequers are of mother-of-pearl and ivory, and tried to play a game, right hand against left. But right hand, who was white, and so moved first, always won. He gave up after awhile, and put the chessmen away in their proper places. Then he got out the big book of photographs of pictures, but they did not seem interesting, so he tried the ivory spellicans. But his hand shook, and you know spellicans is a game you can’t play when your hand shakes. And all the time, behind the chess and the pictures and the spellicans, he was trying not to think about his dream, about how he had climbed that ladder stair, which was really the yard-stick, and gone into the cities that he had built on the tables. Somehow he did not want to remember it. The very idea of remembering made him feel guilty and wretched.

He went and looked out of the window, and as he stood there his wish not to remember the dream made his boots restless, and in their shuffling his right boot kicked against something hard that lay in the folds of the blue brocade curtain.

He looked down, stooped, and picked up little Mr. Noah. The nurse must have dropt it there when she cleared away the city.

And as he looked upon those wooden features it suddenly became impossible not to think of the dream. He let the remembrance of it come, and it came in a flood. And with it the remembrance of what he had done. He had promised to be Lucy’s noble friend, and they had run together to escape from the galloping soldiers. And he had run faster than she. And at the top of the ladder—the ladder of safety—
he had not waited for her
.

“Any old hero would have waited for her, and let her go first,” he told himself. “Any gentleman would—even any
man
—let alone a hero. And I just bunked down the ladder and forgot her. I
left
her there.”

Remorse stirred his boots more ungently than before.

“But it was only a dream,” he said. And then remorse said, as he had felt all along that it would if he only gave it a chance:

“But suppose it wasn’t a dream—suppose it was real. Suppose you
did
leave her there, my noble friend, and that’s why she’s lost.”

Suddenly Philip felt very small, very forlorn, very much alone in the world. But Helen would come back. That telegram would bring her.

Yes. And he would have to tell her that perhaps it was his fault.

It was in vain that Philip told himself that Helen would never believe about the city. He felt that she would. Why shouldn’t she? She knew about the fairy tales and the Arabian Nights. And she would know that these things
did
happen.

“Oh, what shall I do? What shall I do?” he said, quite loud. And there was no one but himself to give the answer.

“If I could only get back into the city,” he said. “But that hateful nurse has pulled it all down and locked up the nursery. So I can’t even build it again. Oh, what
shall
I do?”

And with that he began to cry. For now he felt quite sure that the dream wasn’t a dream—that he really
had
got into the magic city, had promised to stand by Lucy, and had been false to his promise and to her.

He rubbed his eyes with his knuckles and also—rather painfully—with Mr. Noah, whom he still held. “What shall I do?” he sobbed.

And a very, very teeny tiny voice said:

“Put me down.”

“Eh?” said Philip.

“Put me down,” said the voice again. It was such a teeny tiny voice that he could only just hear it. It was unlikely, of course, that the voice could have been Mr. Noah’s; but then whose else could it be? On the bare chance that it
might
have been Mr. Noah who spoke—more unlikely things had happened before, as you know—Philip set the little wooden figure down on the chess-table. It stood there, wooden as ever.

“Put
who
down?” Philip asked. And then, before his eyes, the little wooden figure grew alive, stooped to pick up the yellow disc of wood on which Noah’s Ark people stand, rolled it up like a mat, put it under his arm and began to walk towards the side of the table where Philip stood.

He knelt down to bring his ears nearer the little live moving thing.

“
What
did you say?” he asked, for he fancied that Mr. Noah had again spoken.

“I said, what’s the matter?” said the little voice.

“It’s Lucy. She’s lost and it’s my fault. And I can only just hear you. It hurts my ears hearing you,” complained Philip.

“There’s an ear-trumpet in a box on the middle of the cabinet,” he could just hear the teeny tiny voice say; “it belonged to a great-aunt. Get it out and listen through it.”

Philip got it out. It was an odd curly thing, and at first he could not be sure which end he ought to put to his ear. But he tried both ends, and on the second trial he heard quite a loud, strong, big voice say:

“That’s better.”

“Then it wasn’t a dream last night,” said Philip.

“Of course it wasn’t,” said Mr. Noah.

“Then where is Lucy?”

“In the city, of course. Where you left her.”

“But she
can’t
be,” said Philip desperately. “The city’s all pulled down and gone for ever.”

“The city you built in this room is pulled down,” said Mr. Noah, “but the city you went to wasn’t in this room. Now I put it to you—how could it be?”

“But it
was
,” said Philip, “or else how could I have got into it.”

“It’s a little difficult, I own,” said Mr. Noah. “But, you see, you built those cities in two worlds. It’s pulled down in
this
world. But in the other world it’s going on.”

“I don’t understand,” said Philip.

“I thought you wouldn’t,” said Mr. Noah; “but it’s true, for all that. Everything people make in that world goes on for ever.”

“But how was it that I got in?”

“Because you belong to both worlds. And you built the cities. So they were yours.”

“But Lucy got in.”

“She built up a corner of your city that the nurse had knocked down.”

“But
you
,” said Philip, more and more bewildered. “You’re here. So you can’t be there.”

“But I
am
there,” said Mr. Noah.

“But you’re here. And you’re alive here. What made you come alive?”

“Your tears,” said Mr. Noah. “Tears are very strong magic. No, don’t begin to cry again. What’s the matter?”

“I want to get back into the city.”

“It’s dangerous.”

“I don’t care.”

“You were glad enough to get away,” said Mr. Noah.

“I know: that’s the worst of it,” said Philip. “Oh, isn’t there any way to get back? If I climbed in at the nursery windows and got the bricks and built it all up and—”

“Quite unnecessary, I assure you. There are a thousand doors to that city.”

“I wish I could find
one
,” said Philip; “but, I say, I thought time was all different there. How is it Lucy is lost all this time if time doesn’t count?”

“It does count, now,” said Mr. Noah; “you made it count when you ran away and left Lucy. That set the clocks of the city to the time of this world.”

“I don’t understand,” said Philip; “but it doesn’t matter. Show me the door and I’ll go back and find Lucy.”

“Build something and go through it,” said Mr. Noah. “That’s all. Your tears are dry on me now. Good-bye.” And he laid down his yellow mat, stepped on to it and was just a little wooden figure again.

Philip dropped the ear-trumpet and looked at Mr. Noah.

“I
don’t
understand,” he said. But this at least he understood. That Helen would come back when she got that telegram, and that before she came he must go into the other world and find the lost Lucy.

“But oh,” he said, “suppose I
don’t
find her. I wish I hadn’t built those cities so big! And time will go on. And, perhaps, when Helen comes back she’ll find
me
lost
too
—as well as Lucy.”

But he dried his eyes and told himself that this was not how heroes behaved. He must build again. Whichever way you looked at it there was no time to be lost. And besides the nurse might occur at any moment.

He looked round for building materials. There was the chess-table. It had long narrow legs set round it, rather like arches. Something might be done with it, with books and candlesticks and Japanese vases.

Something
was
done. Philip built with earnest care, but also with considerable speed. If the nurse should come in before he had made a door and got through it—come in and find him building again—she was quite capable of putting him to bed, where, of course, building is impossible. In a very little time there was a building. But how to get in. He was, alas, the wrong size. He stood helpless, and once more tears pricked and swelled behind his eyelids. One tear fell on his hand.

“Tears are a strong magic,” Mr. Noah had said. And at the thought the tears stopped. Still there
was
a tear, the one on his hand. He rubbed it on the pillar of the porch.

And instantly a queer tight thin feeling swept through him. He felt giddy and shut his eyes. His boots, ever sympathetic, shuffled on the carpet. Or was it the carpet? It was very thick and— He opened his eyes. His feet were once more on the long grass of the illimitable prairie. And in front of him towered the gigantic porch of a vast building and a domino path leading up to it.