The E. Nesbit MEGAPACK ®: 26 Classic Novels and Stories. E. Nesbit
flowers. Also there was a path across it, and he followed the path.
“Because,” he said, “I’m more likely to meet Lucy. Girls always keep to paths. They never explore.”
Which just shows how little he knew about girls.
He looked back after a while, to see what the hall of pillars looked like from outside, but it was already dim in the mists of distance.
But ahead of him he saw a great rough building, rather like Stonehenge.
“I wish I’d come into the other city where the people are, and the soldiers, and the greyhounds, and the cocoa-nuts,” he told himself. “There’s nobody here at all, not even Lucy.”
The loneliness of the place grew more and more unpleasing to Philip. But he went on. It seemed more reasonable than to go back.
“I ought to be very hungry,” he said; “I must have been walking for hours.” But he wasn’t hungry. It may have been the magic, or it may have been the odd breakfast he had had. I don’t know. He spoke aloud because it was so quiet in that strange open country with no one in it but himself. And no sound but the clump, clump of his boots on the path. And it seemed to him that everything grew quieter and quieter till he could almost hear himself think. Loneliness, real loneliness is a dreadful thing. I hope you will never feel it. Philip looked to right and left, and before him, and on all the wide plain nothing moved. There were the grass and flowers, but no wind stirred them. And there was no sign that any living person had ever trodden that path—except that there was a path to tread, and that the path led to the Stonehenge building, and even that seemed to be only a ruin.
“I’ll go as far as that anyhow,” said Philip; “perhaps there’ll be a signboard there or something.”
There was something. Something most unexpected. Philip reached the building; it was really very like Stonehenge, only the pillars were taller and closer together and there was one high solid towering wall; turned the corner of a massive upright and ran almost into the arms, and quite on to the feet of a man in a white apron and a square paper cap, who sat on a fallen column, eating bread and cheese with a clasp-knife.
“I beg your pardon!” Philip gasped.
“Granted, I’m sure,” said the man; “but it’s a dangerous thing to do, Master Philip, running sheer on to chaps’ clasp-knives.”
He set Philip on his feet, and waved the knife, which had been so often sharpened that the blade was half worn away.
“Set you down and get your breath,” he said kindly.
“Why, it’s you!” said Philip.
“Course it is. Who should I be if I wasn’t me? That’s poetry.”
“But how did you get here?”
“Ah!” said the man going on with his bread and cheese, while he talked quite in the friendliest way, “that’s telling.”
“Well, tell then,” said Philip impatiently. But he sat down.
“Well, you say it’s me. Who be it? Give it a name.”
“You’re old Perrin,” said Pip; “I mean, of course, I beg your pardon, you’re Mr. Perrin, the carpenter.”
“And what does carpenters do?”
“Carp, I suppose,” said Philip. “That means they make things, doesn’t it?”
“That’s it,” said the man encouragingly; “what sort of things now might old Perrin have made for you?”
“You made my wheelbarrow, I know,” said Philip, “and my bricks.”
“Ah!” said Mr. Perrin, “now you’ve got it. I made your bricks, seasoned oak, and true to the thousandth of an inch, they was. And that’s how I got here. So now you know.”
“But what are you doing here?” said Philip, wriggling restlessly on the fallen column.
“Waiting for you. Them as knows sent me out to meet you, and give you a hint of what’s expected of you.”
“Well. What is?” said Philip. “I mean I think it’s very kind of you. What is expected?”
“Plenty of time,” said the carpenter, “plenty. Nothing ain’t expected of you till towards sundown.”
“I do think it was most awfully kind of you,” said Philip, who had now thought this over.
“You was kind to old Perrin once,” said that person.
“Was I?” said Philip, much surprised.
“Yes; when my little girl was ailing you brought her a lot of pears off your own tree. Not one of ’em you didn’t ’ave yourself that year, Miss Helen told me. And you brought back our kitten—the sandy and white one with black spots—when it strayed. So I was quite willing to come and meet you when so told. And knowing something of young gentlemen’s peckers, owing to being in business once next door to a boys’ school, I made so bold as to bring you a snack.”
He reached a hand down behind the fallen pillar on which they sat and brought up a basket.
“Here,” he said. And Philip, raising the lid, was delighted to find that he was hungry. It was a pleasant basketful. Meat pasties, red hairy gooseberries, a stone bottle of ginger-beer, a blue mug with Philip on it in gold letters, a slice of soda cake and two farthing sugar-sticks.
“I’m sure I’ve seen that basket before,” said the boy as he ate.
“Like enough. It’s the one you brought them pears down in.”
“Now look here,” said Philip, through his seventh bite of pasty, “you must tell me how you got here. And tell me where you’ve got to. You’ve simply no idea how muddling it all is to me. Do tell me everything. Where are we, I mean, and why? And what I’ve got to do. And why? And when? Tell me every single thing.” And he took the eighth bite.
“You really don’t know, sir?”
“No,” said Philip, contemplating the ninth or last bite but one. It was a large pasty.
“Well then. Here goes. But I was always a poor speaker, and so considered even by friends at cricket dinners and what not.”
“But I don’t want you to speak,” said Philip; “just tell me.”
“Well, then. How did I get here? I got here through having made them bricks what you built this tumble-down old ancient place with.”
“I built?”
“Yes, with them bricks I made you. I understand as this was the first building you ever put up. That’s why it’s first on the road to where you want to get to!”
Philip looked round at the Stonehenge building and saw that it was indeed built of enormous oak bricks.
“Of course,” he said, “only I’ve grown smaller.”
“Or they’ve grown bigger,” said Mr. Perrin; “it’s the same thing. You see it’s like this. All the cities and things you ever built is in this country. I don’t know how it’s managed, no more’n what you do. But so it is. And as you made ’em, you’ve the right to come to them—if you can get there. And you have got there. It isn’t every one has the luck, I’m told. Well, then, you made the cities, but you made ’em out of what other folks had made, things like bricks and chessmen and books and candlesticks and dominoes and brass basins and every sort of kind of thing. An’ all the people who helped to make all them things you used to build with, they’re all here too. D’you see? Making’s the thing. If it was no more than the lad that turned the handle of the grindstone to sharp the knife that carved a bit of a cabinet or what not, or a child that picked a teazle to finish a bit of the cloth that’s glued on to the bottom of a chessman—they’re all here. They’re what’s called the population of your cities.”
“I