Complete Novels of E Nesbit

by Edith Nesbit

  ‘Lor!’ said the cook.

  Before starting for the two thirty-seven train the nurse went back to the drawing-room to destroy Philip’s new building, to restore to their proper places its books, candlesticks, vases, and chessmen.

  There we will leave her.

  CHAPTER IV. THE DRAGON-SLAYER

  When Philip walked up the domino path and under the vast arch into the darkness beyond, his heart felt strong with high resolve. His legs, however, felt weak; strangely weak, especially about the knees. The doorway was so enormous, that which lay beyond was so dark, and he himself so very very small. As he passed under the little gateway which he had built of three dominoes with the little silver knight in armour on the top, he noticed that he was only as high as a domino, and you know how very little that is.

  Philip went along the domino path. He had to walk carefully, for to him the spots on the dominoes were quite deep hollows. But as they were black they were easy to see. He had made three arches, one beyond another, of two pairs of silver candlesticks with silver inkstands on the top of them. The third pair of silver candlesticks had a book on the top of them because there were no more inkstands. And when he had passed through the three silver arches, he stopped.

  Beyond lay a sort of velvety darkness with white gleams in it. And as his eyes became accustomed to the darkness, he saw that he was in a great hall of silver pillars, gigantic silver candlesticks they seemed to be, and they went in long vistas this way and that way and every way, like the hop-poles in a hop-field, so that whichever way you turned, a long pillared corridor lay in front of you.

  Philip had no idea which way he ought to go. It seemed most unlikely that he would find Lucy in a dark hall with silver pillars.

  ‘All the same,’ he said, ‘it’s not so dark as it was, by long chalks.’

  It was not. The silver pillars had begun to give out a faint soft glow like the silver phosphorescence that lies in sea pools in summer time.

  ‘It’s lucky too,’ he said, ‘because of the holes in the floor.’

  The holes were the spots on the dominoes with which the pillared hall was paved.

  ‘I wonder what part of the city where Lucy is I shall come out at?’ Philip asked himself. But he need not have troubled. He did not come out at all. He walked on and on and on and on and on. He thought he was walking straight, but really he was turning first this way and then that, and then the other way among the avenues of silver pillars which all looked just alike.

  He was getting very tired, and he had been walking a long time, before he came to anything that was not silver pillars and velvet black under invisible roofs, and floor paved with dominoes laid very close together.

  ‘Oh, I am glad!’ he said at last, when he saw the pavement narrow to a single line of dominoes just like the path he had come in by. There was an arch too, like the arch by which he had come in. And then he perceived in a shock of miserable surprise that it was, in fact, the same arch and the same domino path. He had come back, after all that walking, to the point from which he had started. It was most mortifying. So silly! Philip sat down on the edge of the domino path to rest and think.

  ‘Suppose I just walk out and don’t believe in magic any more?’ he said to himself. ‘Helen says magic can only happen to people who believe in magic. So if I just walked out and didn’t believe as hard as ever I could, I should be my own right size again, and Lucy would be back, and there wouldn’t be any magic.’

  He walked on and on and on.

  ‘Yes, but,’ said that voice that always would come and join in whenever Philip was talking to himself, ‘suppose Lucy does believe it? Then it’ll all go on for her, whatever you believe, and she won’t be back. Besides, you know you’ve got to believe it, because it’s true.’

  ‘Oh, bother!’ said Philip; ‘I’m tired. I don’t want to go on.’

  ‘You shouldn’t have deserted Lucy,’ said the tiresome voice, ‘then you wouldn’t have had to go back to look for her.’

  ‘But I can’t find my way. How can I find my way?’

  ‘You know well enough. Fix your eyes on a far-off pillar and walk straight to it, and when you’re nearly there fix your eyes a little farther. You’re bound to come out somewhere.’

  ‘But I’m tired and it’s so lonely,’ said Philip.

  ‘Lucy’s lonely too,’ said the voice.

  ‘Drop it!’ said Philip. And he got up and began to walk again. Also he took the advice of that worrying voice and fixed his eyes on a distant pillar.

  ‘But why should I bother?’ he said; ‘this is a sort of dream.’

  ‘Even if it were a dream,’ said the voice, ‘there are adventures in it. So you may as well be adventurous.’

  ‘Oh, all right,’ said Philip, and on he went.

  And by walking very carefully and fixing his eyes a long way off, he did at last come right through the hall of silver pillars, and saw beyond the faint glow of the pillars the blue light of day. It shone very brightly through a very little door, and when Philip came to that door he went through it without hesitation. And there he was in a big field. It was rather like the illimitable prairie, only there were great patches of different-coloured 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.’

  ‘W
ell, 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 see. They’ve got small, like I have,’ said Philip.

  ‘Or the cities has got big,’ said the carpenter; ‘it comes to the same thing. I wish you wouldn’t interrupt, Master Philip. You put me out.’

  ‘I won’t again,’ said Philip. ‘Only do tell me just one thing. How can you be here and at Amblehurst too?’

  ‘We come here,’ said the carpenter slowly, ‘when we’re asleep.’

  ‘Oh!’ said Philip, deeply disappointed; ‘it’s just a dream then?’

  ‘Not it. We come here when we’re too sound asleep to dream. You go through the dreams and come out on the other side where everything’s real. That’s here.’

  ‘Go on,’ said Philip.

  ‘I dunno where I was. You do put me out so.’

  ‘Pop you something or other,’ said Philip.

  ‘Population. Yes. Well, all those people as made the things you made the cities of, they live in the cities and they’ve made the insides to the houses.’

  ‘What do they do?’

  ‘Oh, they just live here. And they buy and sell and plant gardens and work and play like everybody does in other cities. And when they go to sleep they go slap through their dreams and into the other world, and work and play there, see? That’s how it goes on. There’s a lot more, but that’s enough for one time. You get on with your gooseberries.’

  ‘But they aren’t all real people, are they? There’s Mr. Noah?’

  ‘Ah, those is aristocracy, the ones you put in when you built the cities. They’re our old families. Very much respected. They’re all very high up in the world. Came over with the Conker, as the saying is. There’s the Noah family. They’re the oldest of all, of course. And the dolls you’ve put in different times and the tin soldiers, and of course all the Noah’s ark animals is alive except when you used them for building, and then they’re statues.’

  ‘But I don’t see,’ said Philip, ‘I really don’t see how all these cities that I built at different times can still be here, all together and all going on at once, when I know they’ve all been pulled down.’

  ‘Well, I’m no scholard. But I did hear Mr. Noah say once in a lecture — he’s a speaker, if you like — I heard him say it was like when you take a person’s photo. The person is so many inches thick through and so many feet high and he’s round and he’s solid. But in the photo he’s flat. Because everything’s flat in photos. But all the same it’s him right enough. You get him into the photo. Then all you’ve got to do is to get ‘im out again into where everything’s thick and tall and round and solid. And it’s quite easy, I believe, once you know the trick.’

  ‘Stop,’ said Philip suddenly. ‘I think my head’s going to burst.’

  ‘Ah!’ said the carpenter kindly. ‘I felt like that at first. Lie down and try to sleep it off a bit. Eddication does go to your head something crool. I’ve often noticed it.’

  And indeed Philip was quite glad to lie down among the long grass and be covered up with the carpenter’s coat. He fell asleep at once.

  An hour later he woke again, looked at the wrinkled-apple face of Mr. Perrin and began to remember.

  ‘I’m glad you’re here anyhow,’ he said to the carpenter; ‘it was horribly lonely. You don’t know.’

  ‘That’s why I was sent to meet you,’ said Mr. Perrin simply.

  ‘But how did you know?’

  ‘Mr. Noah sent for me early this morning. Bless you
, he knows all about everything. Says he, “You go and meet ‘im and tell ‘im all you can. If he wants to be a Deliverer, let ‘im,” says Mr. Noah.’

  ‘But how do you begin being a Deliverer?’ Philip asked, sitting up and feeling suddenly very grand and manly, and very glad that Lucy was not there to interfere.

  ‘There’s lots of different ways,’ said Mr. Perrin. ‘Your particular way’s simple. You just got to kill the dragon.’

  ‘A live dragon?’

  ‘Live!’ said Mr. Perrin. ‘Why he’s all over the place and as green as grass he is. Lively as a kitten. He’s got a broken spear sticking out of his side, so some one must have had a try at baggin’ him, some time or another.’

  ‘Don’t you think,’ said Philip, a little overcome by this vivid picture, ‘that perhaps I’d better look for Lucy first, and be a Deliverer afterwards?’

  ‘If you’re afraid,’ said Mr. Perrin.

  ‘I’m not,’ said Philip doubtfully.

  ‘You see,’ said the carpenter, ‘what you’ve got to consider is: are you going to be the hero of this ‘ere adventure or ain’t you? You can’t ‘ave it both ways. An’ if you are, you may’s well make up your mind, cause killing a dragon ain’t the end of it, not by no means.’

  ‘Do you mean there are more dragons?’

  ‘Not dragons,’ said the carpenter soothingly; ‘not dragons exactly. But there. I don’t want to lower your heart. If you kills the dragon, then afterwards there’s six more hard things you’ve got to do. And then they make you king. Take it or leave it. Only, if you take it we’d best be starting. And anyhow we may as well get a move on us, because at sundown the dragon comes out to drink and exercise of himself. You can hear him rattling all night among these ‘ere ruins; miles off you can ‘ear ‘im of a still night.’

  ‘Suppose I don’t want to be a Deliverer,’ said Philip slowly.

  ‘Then you’ll be a Destroyer,’ said the carpenter; ‘there’s only these two situations vacant here at present. Come, Master Philip, sir, don’t talk as if you wasn’t going to be a man and do your duty for England, Home and Beauty, like it says in the song. Let’s be starting, shall us?’