The Phoenix and the Carpet · Chapter 2 (1/2)

II

The Topless Tower

The children had seen the Phoenix-egg hatched in the flames in their own nursery grate, and had heard from it how the carpet on their own nursery floor was really the wishing carpet, which would take them anywhere they chose. The carpet had transported them to bed just at the right moment, and the Phoenix had gone to roost on the cornice supporting the window-curtains of the boys’ room.

“Excuse me,” said a gentle voice, and a courteous beak opened, very kindly and delicately, the right eye of Cyril. “I hear the slaves below preparing food. Awaken! A word of explanation and arrangement⁠ ⁠… I do wish you wouldn’t⁠—”

The Phoenix stopped speaking and fluttered away crossly to the cornice-pole; for Cyril had hit out, as boys do when they are awakened suddenly, and the Phoenix was not used to boys, and his feelings, if not his wings, were hurt.

“Sorry,” said Cyril, coming awake all in a minute. “Do come back! What was it you were saying? Something about bacon and rations?”

The Phoenix fluttered back to the brass rail at the foot of the bed.

“I say⁠—you are real,” said Cyril. “How ripping! And the carpet?”

“The carpet is as real as it ever was,” said the Phoenix, rather contemptuously; “but, of course, a carpet’s only a carpet, whereas a Phoenix is superlatively a Phoenix.”

“Yes, indeed,” said Cyril, “I see it is. Oh, what luck! Wake up, Bobs! There’s jolly well something to wake up for today. And it’s Saturday, too.”

“I’ve been reflecting,” said the Phoenix, “during the silent watches of the night, and I could not avoid the conclusion that you were quite insufficiently astonished at my appearance yesterday. The ancients were always very surprised. Did you, by chance, expect my egg to hatch?”

“Not us,” Cyril said.

“And if we had,” said Anthea, who had come in in her nightie when she heard the silvery voice of the Phoenix, “we could never, never have expected it to hatch anything so splendid as you.”

The bird smiled. Perhaps you’ve never seen a bird smile?

“You see,” said Anthea, wrapping herself in the boys’ counterpane, for the morning was chill, “we’ve had things happen to us before;” and she told the story of the Psammead, or sand-fairy.

“Ah yes,” said the Phoenix; “Psammeads were rare, even in my time. I remember I used to be called the Psammead of the Desert. I was always having compliments paid me; I can’t think why.”

“Can you give wishes, then?” asked Jane, who had now come in too.

“Oh, dear me, no,” said the Phoenix, contemptuously, “at least⁠—but I hear footsteps approaching. I hasten to conceal myself.” And it did.

I think I said that this day was Saturday. It was also cook’s birthday, and mother had allowed her and Eliza to go to the Crystal Palace with a party of friends, so Jane and Anthea of course had to help to make beds and to wash up the breakfast cups, and little things like that. Robert and Cyril intended to spend the morning in conversation with the Phoenix, but the bird had its own ideas about this.

“I must have an hour or two’s quiet,” it said, “I really must. My nerves will give way unless I can get a little rest. You must remember it’s two thousand years since I had any conversation⁠—I’m out of practice, and I must take care of myself. I’ve often been told that mine is a valuable life.” So it nestled down inside an old hatbox of father’s, which had been brought down from the box-room some days before, when a helmet was suddenly needed for a game of tournaments, with its golden head under its golden wing, and went to sleep. So then Robert and Cyril moved the table back and were going to sit on the carpet and wish themselves somewhere else. But before they could decide on the place, Cyril said⁠—

“I don’t know. Perhaps it’s rather sneakish to begin without the girls.”

“They’ll be all the morning,” said Robert, impatiently. And then a thing inside him, which tiresome books sometimes call the “inward monitor,” said, “Why don’t you help them, then?”

Cyril’s “inward monitor” happened to say the same thing at the same moment, so the boys went and helped to wash up the teacups, and to dust the drawing-room. Robert was so interested that he proposed to clean the front doorsteps⁠—a thing he had never been allowed to do. Nor was he allowed to do it on this occasion. One reason was that it had already been done by cook.

When all the housework was finished, the girls dressed the happy, wriggling baby in his blue highwayman coat and three-cornered hat, and kept him amused while mother changed her dress and got ready to take him over to granny’s. Mother always went to granny’s every Saturday, and generally some of the children went with her; but today they were to keep house. And their hearts were full of joyous and delightful feelings every time they remembered that the house they would have to keep had a Phoenix in it, and a wishing carpet.

You can always keep the Lamb good and happy for quite a long time if you play the Noah’s Ark game with him. It is quite simple. He just sits on your lap and tells you what animal he is, and then you say the little poetry piece about whatever animal he chooses to be.

Of course, some of the animals, like the zebra and the tiger, haven’t got any poetry, because they are so difficult to rhyme to. The Lamb knows quite well which are the poetry animals.

“I’m a baby bear!” said the Lamb, snugging down; and Anthea began:

“I love my little baby bear,

I love his nose and toes and hair;

I like to hold him in my arm,

And keep him very safe and warm.”

And when she said “very,” of course there was a real bear’s hug.

Then came the eel, and the Lamb was tickled till he wriggled exactly like a real one:

“I love my little baby eel,

He is so squidglety to feel;

He’ll be an eel when he is big⁠—

But now he’s just⁠—a⁠—tiny snig!”

Perhaps you didn’t know that a snig was a baby eel? It is, though, and the Lamb knew it.

“Hedgehog now!” he said; and Anthea went on:

“My baby hedgehog, how I like ye,

Though your back’s so prickly-spiky;

Your front is very soft, I’ve found,

So I must love you front ways round!”

And then she loved him front ways round, while he squealed with pleasure.

It is a very baby game, and, of course, the rhymes are only meant for very, very small people⁠—not for people who are old enough to read books, so I won’t tell you any more of them.

By the time the Lamb had been a baby lion and a baby weasel, and a baby rabbit and a baby rat, mother was ready; and she and the Lamb, having been kissed by everybody and hugged as thoroughly as it is possible to be when you’re dressed for out-of-doors, were seen to the tram by the boys. When the boys came back, everyone looked at everyone else and said⁠—

“Now!”

They locked the front door and they locked the back door, and they fastened all the windows. They moved the table and chairs off the carpet, and Anthea swept it.

“We must show it a little attention,” she said kindly. “We’ll give it tea-leaves next time. Carpets like tea-leaves.”

Then everyone put on its outdoor things, because as Cyril said, they didn’t know where they might be going, and it makes people stare if you go out of doors in November in pinafores and without hats.

Then Robert gently awoke the Phoenix, who yawned and stretched itself, and allowed Robert to lift it on to the middle of the carpet, where it instantly went to sleep again with its crested head tucked under its golden wing as before. Then everyone sat down on the carpet.

“Where shall we go?” was of course the question, and it was warmly discussed. Anthea wanted to go to Japan. Robert and Cyril voted for America, and Jane wished to go to the seaside.

“Because there are donkeys there,” said she.

“Not in November, silly,” said Cyril; and the discussion got warmer and warmer, and still nothing was settled.

“I vote we let the Phoenix decide,” said Robert, at last. So they stroked it till it woke. “We want to go somewhere abroad,” they said, “and we can’t make up our minds where.”

“Let the carpet make up its mind, if it has one,” said the Phoenix. “Just say you wish to go abroad.”

So they did; and the next moment the world seemed to spin upside down, and when it was right way up again and they were ungiddy enough to look about them, they were out of doors.

Out of doors⁠—this is a feeble way to express where they were. They were out of⁠—out of the earth, or off it. In fact, they were floating steadily, safely, splendidly, in the crisp clear air, with the pale bright blue of the sky above them, and far down below the pale bright sun-diamonded waves of the sea. The carpet had stiffened itself somehow, so that it was square and firm like a raft, and it steered itself so beautifully and kept on its way so flat and fearless that no one was at all afraid of tumbling off. In front of them lay land.

“The coast of France,” said the Phoenix, waking up and pointing with its wing. “Where do you wish to go? I should always keep one wish, of course⁠—for emergencies⁠—otherwise you may get into an emergency from which you can’t emerge at all.”

But the children were far too deeply interested to listen.

“I tell you what,” said Cyril: “let’s let the thing go on and on, and when we see a place we really want to stop at⁠—why, we’ll just stop. Isn’t this ripping?”

“It’s like trains,” said Anthea, as they swept over the low-lying coastline and held a steady course above orderly fields and straight roads bordered with poplar trees⁠—“like express trains, only in trains you never can see anything because of grownups wanting the windows shut; and then they breathe on them, and it’s like ground glass, and nobody can see anything, and then they go to sleep.”

“It’s like tobogganing,” said Robert, “so fast and smooth, only there’s no doormat to stop short on⁠—it goes on and on.”

“You darling Phoenix,” said Jane, “it’s all your doing. Oh, look at that ducky little church and the women with flappy cappy things on their heads.”

“Don’t mention it,” said the Phoenix, with sleepy politeness.

“Oh!” said Cyril, summing up all the rapture that was in every heart. “Look at it all⁠—look at it⁠—and think of the Kentish Town Road!”

Everyone looked and everyone thought. And the glorious, gliding, smooth, steady rush went on, and they looked down on strange and beautiful things, and held their breath and let it go in deep sighs, and said “Oh!” and “Ah!” till it was long past dinnertime.

It was Jane who suddenly said, “I wish we’d brought that jam tart and cold mutton with us. It would have been jolly to have a picnic in the air.”

The jam tart and cold mutton were, however, far away, sitting quietly in the larder of the house in Camden Town which the children were supposed to be keeping. A mouse was at that moment tasting the outside of the raspberry jam part of the tart (she had nibbled a sort of gulf, or bay, through the pastry edge) to see whether it was the sort of dinner she could ask her little mouse-husband to sit down to. She had had a very good dinner herself. It is an ill wind that blows nobody any good.

“We’ll stop as soon as we see a nice place,” said Anthea. “I’ve got threepence, and you boys have the fourpence each that your trams didn’t cost the other day, so we can buy things to eat. I expect the Phoenix can speak French.”

The carpet was sailing along over rocks and rivers and trees and towns and farms and fields. It reminded everybody of a certain time when all of them had had wings, and had flown up to the top of a church tower, and had had a feast there of chicken and tongue and new bread and soda-water. And this again reminded them how hungry they were. And just as they were all being reminded of this very strongly indeed, they saw ahead of them some ruined walls on a hill, and strong and upright, and really, to look at, as good as new⁠—a great square tower.

“The top of that’s just the exactly same size as the carpet,” said Jane. “I think it would be good to go to the top of that, because then none of the Abby-what’s-its-names⁠—I mean natives⁠—would be able to take the carpet away even if they wanted to. And some of us could go out and get things to eat⁠—buy them honestly, I mean, not take them out of larder windows.”

“I think it would be better if we went⁠—” Anthea was beginning; but Jane suddenly clenched her hands.

“I don’t see why I should never do anything I want, just because I’m the youngest. I wish the carpet would fit itself in at the top of that tower⁠—so there!”

The carpet made a disconcerting bound, and next moment it was hovering above the square top of the tower. Then slowly and carefully it began to sink under them. It was like a lift going down with you at the Army and Navy Stores.

“I don’t think we ought to wish things without all agreeing to them first,” said Robert, huffishly. “Hullo! What on earth?”

For unexpectedly and greyly something was coming up all round the four sides of the carpet. It was as if a wall were being built by magic quickness. It was a foot high⁠—it was two feet high⁠—three, four, five. It was shutting out the light⁠—more and more.

Anthea looked up at the sky and the walls that now rose six feet above them.

“We’re dropping into the tower,” she screamed. “There wasn’t any top to it. So the carpet’s going to fit itself in at the bottom.”

Robert sprang to his feet.

“We ought to have⁠—Hullo! an owl’s nest.” He put his knee on a jutting smooth piece of grey stone, and reached his hand into a deep window slit⁠—broad to the inside of the tower, and narrowing like a funnel to the outside.

“Look sharp!” cried everyone, but Robert did not look sharp enough. By the time he had drawn his hand out of the owl’s nest⁠—there were no eggs there⁠—the carpet had sunk eight feet below him.

“Jump, you silly cuckoo!” cried Cyril, with brotherly anxiety.

But Robert couldn’t turn round all in a minute into a jumping position. He wriggled and twisted and got on to the broad ledge, and by the time he was ready to jump the walls of the tower had risen up thirty feet above the others, who were still sinking with the carpet, and Robert found himself in the embrasure of a window; alone, for even the owls were not at home that day. The wall was smoothish; there was no climbing up, and as for climbing down⁠—Robert hid his face in his hands, and squirmed back and back from the giddy verge, until the back part of him was wedged quite tight in the narrowest part of the window slit.

He was safe now, of course, but the outside part of his window was like a frame to a picture of part of the other side of the tower. It was very pretty, with moss growing between the stones and little shiny gems; but between him and it there was the width of the tower, and nothing in it but empty air. The situation was terrible. Robert saw in a flash that the carpet was likely to bring them into just the same sort of tight places that they used to get into with the wishes the Psammead granted them.

And the others⁠—imagine their feelings as the carpet sank slowly and steadily to the very bottom of the tower, leaving Robert clinging to the wall. Robert did not even try to imagine their feelings⁠—he had quite enough to do with his own; but you can.

As soon as the carpet came to a stop on the ground at the bottom of the inside of the tower it suddenly lost that raft-like stiffness which had been such a comfort during the journey from Camden Town to the topless tower, and spread itself limply over the loose stones and little earthy mounds at the bottom of the tower, just exactly like any ordinary carpet. Also it shrank suddenly, so that it seemed to draw away from under their feet, and they stepped quickly off the edges and stood on the firm ground, while the carpet drew itself in till it was its proper size, and no longer fitted exactly into the inside of the tower, but left quite a big space all round it.