The Magic City

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He was alone in the middle of the stable-yard when the thought came to
him.

'Perhaps they're only made invisible. Perhaps they're all here and
watching me and making fun of me.'

He stood still to think this. It was not a pleasant thought.

Suddenly he straightened his little back, and threw back his head.

'They shan't see I'm frightened anyway,' he told himself. And then he
remembered the larder.

'I haven't had any breakfast,' he explained aloud, so as to be plainly
heard by any invisible people who might be about. 'I ought to have my
breakfast. If nobody gives it to me I shall take my breakfast.'

He waited for an answer. But none came. It was very quiet in the
stable-yard. Only the rattle of a halter ring against a manger, the
sound of a hoof on stable stones, the cooing of pigeons and the rustle
of straw in the loose-box broke the silence.

'Very well,' said Philip. 'I don't know what _you_ think I ought to have
for breakfast, so I shall take what _I_ think.'

He drew a long breath, trying to draw courage in with it, threw back his
shoulders more soldierly than ever, and marched in through the back door
and straight to the larder. Then he took what he thought he ought to
have for breakfast. This is what he thought:

1 cherry pie,
2 custards in cups,
1 cold sausage,
2 pieces of cold toast,
1 piece of cheese,
2 lemon cheese-cakes,
1 small jam tart (there was only one left),
Butter, 1 pat.

'What jolly things the servants have to eat,' he said. 'I never knew. I
thought that nothing but mutton and rice grew here.'

He put all the food on a silver tray and carried it out on to the
terrace, which lies between the two wings at the back of the house. Then
he went back for milk, but there was none to be seen so he got a white
jug full of water. The spoons he couldn't find, but he found a
carving-fork and a fish-slice. Did you ever try to eat cherry pie with a
fish-slice?

'Whatever's happened,' said Philip to himself, through the cherry pie,
'and whatever happens it's as well to have had your breakfast.' And he
bit a generous inch off the cold sausage which he had speared with the
carving-fork.

And now, sitting out in the good sunshine, and growing less and less
hungry as he plied fish-slice and carving-fork, his mind went back to
his dream, which began to seem more and more real. Suppose it really
_had_ happened? It might have; magic things did happen, it seemed. Look
how all the people had vanished out of the house--out of the world too,
perhaps.

'Suppose every one's vanished,' said Philip. 'Suppose I'm the only
person left in the world who hasn't vanished. Then everything in the
world would belong to me. Then I could have everything that's in all the
toy shops.' And his mind for a moment dwelt fondly on this beautiful
idea.

Then he went on. 'But suppose I vanished too? Perhaps if I were to
vanish I could see the other people who have. I wonder how it's done.'

He held his breath and tried hard to vanish. Have you ever tried this?
It is not at all easy to do. Philip could not do it at all. He held his
breath and he tried and he tried, but he only felt fatter and fatter and
more and more as though in one more moment he should burst. So he let
his breath go.

'No,' he said, looking at his hands; 'I'm not any more invisible than I
was before. Not so much I think,' he added thoughtfully, looking at what
was left of the cherry pie. 'But that dream----'

He plunged deep in the remembrance of it that was, to him, like swimming
in the waters of a fairy lake.

He was hooked out of his lake suddenly by voices. It was like waking up.
There, away across the green park beyond the sunk fence, were people
coming.

'So every one hasn't vanished,' he said, caught up the tray and took it
in. He hid it under the pantry shelf. He didn't know who the people were
who were coming and you can't be too careful. Then he went out and made
himself small in the shadow of a red buttress, heard their voices coming
nearer and nearer. They were all talking at once, in that quick
interested way that makes you certain something unusual has happened.

He could not hear exactly what they were saying, but he caught the
words: 'No.'

'Of course I've asked.'

'Police.'

'Telegram.'

'Yes, of course.'

'Better make quite sure.'

Then every one began speaking all at once, and you could not hear
anything that anybody said. Philip was too busy keeping behind the
buttress to see who they were who were talking. He was glad _something_
had happened.

'Now I shall have something to think about besides the nurse and my
beautiful city that she has pulled down.'

But what was it that had happened? He hoped nobody was hurt--or had done
anything wrong. The word police had always made him uncomfortable ever
since he had seen a boy no bigger than himself pulled along the road by
a very large policeman. The boy had stolen a loaf, Philip was told.
Philip could never forget that boy's face; he always thought of it in
church when it said 'prisoners and captives,' and still more when it
said 'desolate and oppressed.'

'I do hope it's not _that_,' he said.

And slowly he got himself to leave the shelter of the red-brick buttress
and to follow to the house those voices and those footsteps that had
gone by him.

He followed the sound of them to the kitchen. The cook was there in
tears and a Windsor arm-chair. The kitchenmaid, her cap all on one side,
was crying down most dirty cheeks. The coachman was there, very red in
the face, and the groom, without his gaiters. The nurse was there, neat
as ever she seemed at first, but Philip was delighted when a more
careful inspection showed him that there was mud on her large shoes and
on the bottom of her skirt, and that her dress had a large
three-cornered tear in it.

'I wouldn't have had it happen for a twenty-pun note,' the coachman was
saying.

'George,' said the nurse to the groom, 'you go and get a horse ready.
I'll write the telegram.'

'You'd best take Peppermint,' said the coachman. 'She's the fastest.'

The groom went out, saying under his breath, 'Teach your grandmother,'
which Philip thought rude and unmeaning.

Philip was standing unnoticed by the door. He felt that thrill--if it
isn't pleasure it is more like it than anything else--which we all feel
when something real has happened.

But what _had_ happened. What?

'I wish I'd never come back,' said the nurse. 'Then nobody could pretend
it was _my_ fault.'

'It don't matter what they pretend,' the cook stopped crying to say.
'The thing is what's happened. Oh, my goodness. I'd rather have been
turned away without a character than have had this happen.'

'And I'd rather _any_thing,' said the nurse. 'Oh, my goodness me. I wish
I'd never been born.'

And then and there, before the astonished eyes of Philip, she began to
behave as any nice person might--she began to cry.

'It wouldn't have happened,' said the cook, 'if the master hadn't been
away. He's a Justice of the Peace, he is, and a terror to gipsies. It
wouldn't never have happened if----'

Philip could not bear it any longer.

'_What_ wouldn't have happened if?' he asked, startling everybody to a
quick jump of surprise.

The nurse stopped crying and turned to look at him.

'Oh, _you_!' she said slowly. 'I forgot _you_. You want your breakfast,
I suppose, no matter what's happened?'

'No, I don't,' said Philip, with extreme truth. 'I want to know what
_has_ happened?'

'Miss Lucy's lost,' said the cook heavily, 'that's what's happened. So
now you know. You run along and play, like a good little boy, and don't
make extry trouble for us in the trouble we're in.'

'Lost?' repeated Philip.

'Yes, lost. I expect you're glad,' said the nurse, 'the way you treated
her. You hold your tongue and don't let me so much as hear you breathe
the next twenty-four hours. I'll go and write that telegram.'

Philip thought it best not to let any one hear him breathe. By this
means he heard the telegram when nurse read it aloud to the cook.

'Peter Graham, Esq.,
Hotel Wagram,
Brussels.

Miss Lucy lost. Please come home immediately.

PHILKINS.

That's all right, isn't it?'

'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, 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 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.

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.

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 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.'

'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.'

[Illustration: He heard quite a loud, strong, big voice say, 'That's
better.']

'But _you_,' said Philip, more and more bewildered. 'You're here. So you
can't be there.'

'But I _am_ there,' said Mr. Noah.

'But you're here. And you're alive here. What made you come alive?'

'Your tears,' said Mr. Noah. 'Tears are very strong magic. No, don't
begin to cry again. What's the matter?'

'I want to get back into the city.'

'It's dangerous.'

'I don't care.'

'You were glad enough to get away,' said Mr. Noah.

'I know: that's the worst of it,' said Philip. 'Oh, isn't there any way
to get back? If I climbed in at the nursery windows and got the bricks
and built it all up and----'

'Quite unnecessary, I assure you. There are a thousand doors to that
city.'

'I wish I could find _one_,' said Philip; 'but, I say, I thought time
was all different there. How is it Lucy is lost all this time if time
doesn't count?'

'It does count, now,' said Mr. Noah; 'you made it count when you ran
away and left Lucy. That set the clocks of the city to the time of this
world.'

'I don't understand,' said Philip; 'but it doesn't matter. Show me the
door and I'll go back and find Lucy.'

'Build something and go through it,' said Mr. Noah. 'That's all. Your
tears are dry on me now. Good-bye.' And he laid down his yellow mat,
stepped on to it and was just a little wooden figure again.

Philip dropped the ear-trumpet and looked at Mr. Noah.

'I _don't_ understand,' he said. But this at least he understood. That
Helen would come back when she got that telegram, and that before she
came he must go into the other world and find the lost Lucy.

'But oh,' he said, 'suppose I _don't_ find her. I wish I hadn't built
those cities so big! And time will go on. And, perhaps, when Helen comes
back she'll find _me_ lost _too_--as well as Lucy.'

But he dried his eyes and told himself that this was not how heroes
behaved. He must build again. Whichever way you looked at it there was
no time to be lost. And besides the nurse might occur at any moment.

He looked round for building materials. There was the chess-table. It
had long narrow legs set round it, rather like arches. Something might
be done with it, with books and candlesticks and Japanese vases.

Something _was_ done. Philip built with earnest care, but also with
considerable speed. If the nurse should come in before he had made a
door and got through it--come in and find him building again--she was
quite capable of putting him to bed, where, of course, building is
impossible. In a very little time there was a building. But how to get
in. He was, alas, the wrong size. He stood helpless, and once more tears
pricked and swelled behind his eyelids. One tear fell on his hand.

'Tears are a strong magic,' Mr. Noah had said. And at the thought the
tears stopped. Still there _was_ a tear, the one on his hand. He rubbed
it on the pillar of the porch.

And instantly a queer tight thin feeling swept through him. He felt
giddy and shut his eyes. His boots, ever sympathetic, shuffled on the
carpet. Or was it the carpet? It was very thick and---- He opened his
eyes. His feet were once more on the long grass of the illimitable
prairie. And in front of him towered the gigantic porch of a vast
building and a domino path leading up to it.

'Oh, I am so glad,' cried Philip among the grass. 'I couldn't have borne
it if she'd been lost for ever, and all my fault.'

The gigantic porch lowered frowningly above him. What would he find on
the other side of it?

[Illustration: The gigantic porch lowered frowningly above him.]

'I don't care. I've simply got to go,' he said, and stepped out bravely.
'If I can't _be_ a hero I'll try to behave like one.'

And with that he stepped out, stumbling a little in the thick grass, and
the dark shadow of the porch received him.

. . . . . . .

'Bother the child,' said the nurse, coming into the drawing-room a
little later; 'if he hasn't been at his precious building game again! I
shall have to give him a lesson over this--I can see that. And I will
too--a lesson he won't forget in a hurry.'

She went through the house, looking for the too bold builder that she
might give him that lesson. Then she went through the garden, still on
the same errand.

Half an hour later she burst into the servants' hall and threw herself
into a chair.

'I don't care what happens now,' she said. 'The house is bewitched, I
think. I shall go the very minute I've had my dinner.'

'What's up now?' the cook came to the door to say.

'Up?' said the nurse. 'Oh, nothing's _up_. What should there be?
Everything's all right and beautiful, and just as it should be, of
course.'

'Miss Lucy's not found yet, of course, but that's all, isn't it?'

'All? And enough too, I should have thought,' said the nurse. 'But as it
happens it's _not_ all. The boy's lost now. Oh, I'm not joking. He's
lost I tell you, the same as the other one--and I'm off out of this by
the two thirty-seven train, and I don't care who knows it.'

'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.'

[Illustration: 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.'

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