The Magic City by E. Nesbit (free e reader .txt) 📕

'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,[79] 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 gipsies 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 gipsies 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[80] 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.[81]

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.[82]

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[83] 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.'[84]

'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.'[85]