The Greatest Works of E. Nesbit (220+ Titles in One Illustrated Edition). Эдит Несбит
slowly resuming its ordinary size. ‘Don’t you see? If these children let their father see them, they’ll have to explain the whole magic, and when once magic’s explained all the magic’s gone, like the scent out of scent when you leave the cork out of the bottle. But you can see him and help – if he wants help – without having to explain anything.’
‘All right,’ said Richard, and muttered something about ‘the Head of the House.’ ‘Only,’ he added, ‘I dropped my magic here.’ He stooped to the sand and picked up a little stick with silver bells hung round it, like the one that Folly carries at a carnival. ‘It’s got the Arden arms and crest on it,’ he said, pointing, and by the light of the pearl and ivory clock the children could see the shield and the chequers and the Mouldiwarp above. ‘Now I’m ready. Cousins, I take back everything I said. You see my father’s dead … and if I’d only had half your chance… That was what I thought. See? So give us your hand.’
The hands were given.
‘But oh,’ said Elfrida, ‘this is different from all the rest; that was a game, and this is – this is—’
‘This is real, my sock-lamb,’ said the Mouldiwarp with unusual kindness. ‘Now your Cousin Richard will help you, and when you get your father back, as I make no doubts but what you will, then your Cousin Dick he’ll go back to his own time and generation, and be seen no more, and your father won’t never guess that you was there so close to him as you will be.’
‘I don’t believe we shall,’ said Elfrida, nodding stubbornly, and for the first time in this story she did not believe.
‘Oh, well,’ said the Mouldiwarp bitterly, ‘of course if you don’t believe you’ll find him, you’ll not find him. That’s plain as a currant loaf.’
‘But I believe we shall find him,’ said Edred, ‘and Elfrida’s only a girl. It might be only a dream, of course,’ he added thoughtfully. ‘Don’t you think I don’t know that. But if it’s a dream, I’m going to stay in it. I’m not going back to Arden without my father.’
‘Do you understand,’ said the Mouldiwarp, ‘that if I take you into any other time or place in your own century, it’s the full stop? There isn’t any more.’
‘It means there’s no chance of our getting into the past again, to look for treasure or anything?’
‘Oh, chance!’ said the Mouldiwarp. ‘I mean no magic clock’ll not never be made for you no more, that’s what I mean. And if you find your father you’ll not be Lord Arden any more, either!’
I hope it will not shock you very much when I tell you at that thought a distinct pang shot through Edred’s breast. He really felt it, in his flesh-and-blood breast, like a sharp knife. It was dreadful of him to think of such a thing, when there was a chance of his getting his daddy in exchange for just a title. It was dreadful; but I am a truthful writer, and I must own the truth. In one moment he felt the most dreadful things – that it was all nonsense, and perhaps daddy wasn’t there, and it was no good looking for him any way, and he wanted to go on being Lord Arden, and hadn’t they better go home.
The thoughts came quite without his meaning them to, and Edred pushed them from him with both hands, so to speak, hating himself because they had come to him. And he will hate himself for those thoughts, though he did not mean or wish to have them, as long as he lives, every time he remembers them. That is the worst of thoughts, they live for ever.
‘I don’t want to be Lord Arden,’ was what he instantly said – ‘I want my father.’ And what he said was true, in spite of those thoughts that he didn’t mean to have and can never forget.
‘Shall I come along of you?’ said the Mouldiwarp, and everyone said ‘Yes,’ very earnestly. A friendly Mouldiwarp is a very useful thing to have at hand when you are going you don’t know where.
‘Now, you won’t make any mistake,’ the mole went on. ‘This is the wind-up and the end-all. So it is. No more chestses in atticses. No more fine clotheses out of ’em neither. An’ no more white clocks.’
‘All right,’ said Edred impatiently, ‘we understand. Now let’s go.’
‘You wait a bit,’ said the Mouldiwarp aggravatingly. ‘You’ve got to settle what you’ll be, and what way your father’d better come out. I think through the chink of the chalk.’
‘Any way you like,’ said Elfrida. ‘And Mouldiwarp, dear, shan’t we ever see you again?’
‘Oh, I don’t say that,’ it said. ‘You’ll see me at dinner every day.’
‘At dinner?’
‘I’m on all the spoons and forks, anyhow,’ it said, and sniggered more aggravatingly than ever.
‘Mouldie!’ cried Edred suddenly, ‘I’ve got it. You disguise us so that Father won’t know us, and then we shan’t be out of it all, whatever it is.’
‘I think that’s a first-rate idea,’ said Richard; ‘and me too.’
‘Not you,’ said the Mouldiwarp. But it waved a white paw at Edred and Elfrida, and at once they found themselves dressed in tight-fitting white fur dresses. Their hands even wore fat, white fur gloves with tiger claws at the ends of the fingers. At the same moment the Mouldiwarp grew big again – to the size of a very small Polar bear, while Cousin Richard suddenly assumed the proportions of a giant.
‘Now!’ said the Mouldiwarp, and they all leapt on the white clock, which started at once.
When it stopped, and they stepped off it, it was on to a carpet of thick moss. Overhead, through the branches of enormous trees, there shone stars of a wonderful golden brightness. The air was warm-scented as if with flowers, and warm to breathe, yet they did not feel that their fur coats were a bit too warm for the weather. The moss was so soft to their feet that Edred and Elfrida wanted to feel it with their hands as well, so down they went on all fours. Then they longed to lie down and roll on it; they longed so much that they had to do it. It was a delicious sensation, rolling in the soft moss.
Cousin Richard, still very much too big, stood looking down on them and laughing. They were too busy rolling to look at each other.
‘This,’ he said, ‘is a first-class lark. Now for the cleft in the chalk. Shall I carry you?’ he added politely, addressing the Mouldiwarp, who, rather surprisingly, consented.
‘Come on,’ he said to the children, and as he went they followed him.
There was something about the moss, or about the fur coats or the fur gloves, that somehow made it seem easier and more natural to follow on all fours – and really their hands were quite as useful to walk on as their feet. Never had they felt so light, so gay, never had walking been such easy work. They followed Richard through the forest till quite abruptly, like the wall at the end of a shrubbery, a great cliff rose in front of them, ending the forest. There was a cleft in it, they saw the darkness of it rising above them as the moon came out from a cloud and shone full on the cliff’s white face and the face of the cliff and the shape of the cleft were very like that little cleft in the chalk that the Mouldiwarp had made when it had pulled up turf on the Sussex downs at home. And all this time Edred and Elfrida had never looked at each other. There had been so many other things to look at.
‘That’s the way,’ said Cousin Richard, pointing up the dark cleft. Though it was so dark Edred and Elfrida could see quite plainly that there were no steps – only ledges that a very polite goat might have said were a foothold.
‘You couldn’t climb up there,’ Edred said to the great Richard; yet somehow he never doubted that he and Elfrida could.
‘No,’ said the Mouldiwarp, leaping from Richard’s arms to the ground, ‘I must carry him’ – and it grew to Polar bear size quite calmly before their very eyes.
‘They don’t see it – even yet,’ said Richard to the mole.