The Magic City

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It was, as you see, an excellent plan, as far as it went. Philip sat on
the top of his tower quite free from anxiety, and ate a few hairy red
gooseberries that happened to be loose in his pocket. Within three
minutes of his lighting his Roman candle a shower of golden rain went up
in the south, some immense Catherine-wheels appeared in the east, and in
the north a long line of rockets presented almost the appearance of an
aurora borealis. Red fire, green fire, then rockets again. The whole of
the plain was lit by more fireworks than Philip had ever seen, even at
the Crystal Palace. By their light he saw a procession come out of the
fort, cross to a pillar that stood solitary on the plain, and tie to it
a white figure.

'The Princess, I suppose,' said Philip; 'well, _she's_ all right
anyway.'

Then the procession went back to the fort, and then the dragon awoke.
Philip could see the great creature stretching itself and shaking its
vast head as a dog does when it comes out of the water.

'I expect it doesn't like the fireworks,' said Philip. And he was quite
right.

And now the dragon saw the Princess who had been placed at a convenient
spot about half-way between the ruins and Philip's tower.

It threw up its snout and uttered a devastating howl, and Philip felt
with a thrill of horror that, clockwork or no clockwork, the brute was
alive, and desperately dangerous.

And now it had perceived that it was bound. With great heavings and
throes, with snortings and bellowings, with scratchings and tearings of
its great claws and lashings of its terrible tail, it writhed and
fought to be free, and the light of thousands of fireworks illuminated
the gigantic struggle.

Then what Philip had known would happen, did happen. The great wall held
fast, the rope held fast, the dragon held fast. It was the key that gave
way. With an echoing grinding rusty sound like a goods train shunting on
a siding, the key was drawn from the keyhole in the dragon's side and
left still fast to its rope like an anchor to a cable.

_Left._ For now that happened which Philip had not foreseen. He had
forgotten that before it fell asleep the dragon had partly wound itself
up. And its struggles had not used up all the winding. There was go in
the dragon yet. And with a yell of fury it set off across the plain,
wriggling its green rattling length towards--the Princess.

And now there was no time to think whether one was afraid or not. Philip
went down those tower stairs more quickly than he had ever gone down
stairs in his life, and he was not bad at stairs even at ordinary times.

He put his sword over his shoulder as you do a gun, and ran. Like the
dragon he made straight for the Princess. And now it was a race between
him and the dragon. Philip ran and ran. His heart thumped, his feet had
that leaden feeling that comes in nightmares. He felt as if he were
dying.

Keep on, keep on, faster, faster, you mustn't stop. Ah! that's better.
He has got his second wind. He is going faster. And the dragon, or is it
fancy? is going not quite so fast.

How he did it Philip never knew. But with a last spurt he reached the
pillar where the Princess stood bound. And the dragon was twenty yards
away, coming on and on and on.

Philip stood quite still, recovering his breath. And more and more
slowly, but with no sign of stopping, the dragon came on. Behind him,
where the pillar was, Philip heard some one crying softly.

Then the dragon was quite near. Philip took three steps forward, took
aim with his sword, shut his eyes and hit as hard as he could. Then
something hard and heavy knocked him over, and for a time he knew no
more.

. . . . . . .

When he came to himself again, Mr. Noah was giving him something nasty
to drink out of a medicine glass, Mr. Perrin was patting him on the
back, all the people were shouting like mad, and more fireworks than
ever were being let off. Beside him lay the dragon, lifeless and still.

[Illustration: Then something hard and heavy knocked him over.]

'Oh!' said Philip, 'did I really do it?'

'You did indeed,' said Mr. Noah; 'however you may succeed with the other
deeds, you are the hero of this one. And now, if you feel well enough,
prepare to receive the reward of Valour and Chivalry.'

'Oh!' said Philip, brightening, 'I didn't know there was to be a
reward.'

'Only the usual one,' said Mr Noah. 'The Princess, you know.'

Philip became aware that a figure in a white veil was standing quite
near him; round its feet lay lengths of cut rope.

'The Princess is yours,' said Mr. Noah, with generous affability.

'But I don't want her,' said Philip, adding by an afterthought, 'thank
you.'

'You should have thought of that before,' said Mr. Noah. 'You can't go
doing deeds of valour, you know, and then shirking the reward. Take her.
She is yours.'

'Any one who likes may have her,' said Philip desperately. 'If she's
mine, I can give her away, can't I? You must see yourself I can't be
bothered with princesses if I've got all those other deeds to do.'

'That's not my affair,' said Mr. Noah. 'Perhaps you might arrange to
board her out while you're doing your deeds. But at present she is
waiting for you to take her by the hand and raise her veil.'

'Must I?' said Philip miserably. 'Well, here goes.'

He took a small cold hand in one of his and with the other lifted, very
gingerly, a corner of the veil. The other hand of the Princess drew back
the veil, and the Dragon-Slayer and the Princess were face to face.

'Why!' cried Philip, between relief and disgust, 'it's only Lucy!'

CHAPTER V

ON THE CARPET

The Princess was just Lucy.

'It's too bad,' said Philip. 'I do think.' Then he stopped short and
just looked cross.

'The Princess and the Champion will now have their teas,' said Mr. Noah.
'Right about face, everybody, please, and quick march.'

Philip and Lucy found themselves marching side by side through the night
made yellow with continuous fireworks.

You must picture them marching across a great plain of grass where many
coloured flowers grew. You see a good many of Philip's buildings had
been made on the drawing-room carpet at home, which was green with pink
and blue and yellow and white flowers. And this carpet had turned into
grass and growing flowers, following that strange law which caused
things to change into other things, like themselves, but larger and
really belonging to a living world.

No one spoke. Philip said nothing because he was in a bad temper. And if
you are in a bad temper, nothing is a good thing to say. To circumvent a
dragon and then kill it, and to have such an adventure end in tea with
Lucy, was too much. And he had other reasons for silence too. And Lucy
was silent because she had so much to say that she didn't know where to
begin; and besides, she could feel how cross Philip was. The crowd did
not talk because it was not etiquette to talk when taking part in
processions. Mr. Noah did not talk because it made him out of breath to
walk and talk at the same time, two things neither of which he had been
designed to do.

So that it was quite a silent party which at last passed through the
gateway of the town and up its streets.

Philip wondered where the tea would be--not in the prison of course. It
was very late for tea, too, quite the middle of the night it seemed. But
all the streets were brilliantly lighted, and flags and festoons of
flowers hung from all the windows and across all the streets.

It was in the front of a big building in one of the great squares of the
city that an extra display of coloured lamps disclosed open doors and
red-carpeted steps. Mr. Noah hurried up them, and turned to receive
Philip and Lucy.

'The City of Polistopolis,' he said, 'whose unworthy representative I
am, greets in my person the most noble Sir Philip, Knight and Slayer of
the Dragon. Also the Princess whom he has rescued. Be pleased to enter.'

They went up the red-cloth covered steps and into a hall, very splendid
with silver and ivory. Mr. Noah stooped to a confidential question.

'You'd like a wash, perhaps?' he said, 'and your Princess too. And
perhaps you'd like to dress up a little? Before the banquet, you know.'

'Banquet?' said Philip. 'I thought it was tea.'

'Business before pleasure,' said Mr. Noah; 'first the banquet, then the
tea. This way to the dressing-rooms.'

There were two doors side by side. On one door was painted 'Knight's
dressing-room,' on the other 'Princess's dressing-room.'

'Look out,' said Mr. Noah; 'the paint is wet. You see there wasn't much
time.'

Philip found his dressing-room very interesting. The walls were entirely
of looking-glass, and on tables in the middle of the room lay all sorts
of clothes of beautiful colours and odd shapes. Shoes, stockings, hats,
crowns, armour, swords, cloaks, breeches, waistcoats, jerkins, trunk
hose. An open door showed a marble bath-room. The bath was sunk in the
floor as the baths of luxurious Roman Empresses used to be, and as
nowadays baths sometimes are, in model dwellings. (Only I am told that
some people keep their coals in the baths--which is quite useless
because coals are always black however much you wash them.)

Philip undressed and went into the warm clear water, greenish between
the air and the marble. Why is it so pleasant to have a bath, and so
tiresome to wash your hands and face in a basin? He put on his shirt and
knickerbockers again, and wandered round the room looking at the clothes
laid out there, and wondering which of the wonderful costumes would be
really suitable for a knight to wear at a banquet. After considerable
hesitation he decided on a little soft shirt of chain-mail that made
just a double handful of tiny steel links as he held it. But a
difficulty arose.

'I don't know how to put it on,' said Philip; 'and I expect the banquet
is waiting. How cross it'll be.'

He stood undecided, holding the chain mail in his hands, when his eyes
fell on a bell handle. Above it was an ivory plate, and on it in black
letters the word Valet. Philip rang the bell.

Instantly a soft tap at the door heralded the entrance of a person whom
Philip at the first glance supposed to be a sandwich man. But the second
glance showed that the oblong flat things which he wore were not
sandwich-boards, but dominoes. The person between them bowed low.

'Oh!' said Philip, 'I rang for the valet.'

'I am not the valet,' said the domino-enclosed person, who seemed to be
in skintight black clothes under his dominoes, 'I am the Master of the
Robes. I only attend on really distinguished persons. Double-six, at
your service, Sir. Have you chosen your dress?'

'I'd like to wear the armour,' said Philip, holding it out. 'It seems
the right thing for a Knight,' he added.

'Quite so, sir. I confirm your opinion.'

He proceeded to dress Philip in a white tunic and to fasten the coat of
mail over this. 'I've had a great deal of experience,' he said; 'you
couldn't have chosen better. You see, I'm master of the subject of
dress. I am able to give my whole mind to it; my own dress being fixed
by law and not subject to changes of fashion leaves me free to think for
others. And I think deeply. But I see that you can think for yourself.'

You have no idea how jolly Philip looked in the mail coat and mailed
hood--just like a Crusader.

At the doorway of the dressing-room he met Lucy in a short white dress
and a coronal of pearls round her head. 'I always wanted to be a fairy,'
she said.

'Did you have any one to dress you?' he asked.

'Oh no!' said Lucy calmly. 'I always dress myself.'

'Ladies have the advantage there,' said Double-six, bowing and walking
backwards. 'The banquet is spread.'

It turned out to be spread on three tables, one along each side of a
great room, and one across the top of the room, on a dais--such a table
as that high one at which dons and distinguished strangers sit in the
Halls of colleges.

Mr. Noah was already in his place in the middle of the high table, and
Lucy and Philip now took their places at each side of him. The table was
spread with all sorts of nice-looking foods and plates of a
pink-and-white pattern very familiar to Philip. They were, in fact, as
he soon realised, the painted wooden plates from his sister's old dolls'
house. There was no food just in front of the children, only a great
empty bowl of silver.

Philip fingered his knife and fork; the pattern of those also was
familiar to him. They were indeed the little leaden ones out of the
dolls' house knife-basket of green and silver filagree. He hungrily
waited. Servants in straight yellow dresses and red masks and caps were
beginning to handle the dishes. A dish was handed to him. A beautiful
jelly it looked like. He took up his spoon and was just about to help
himself, when Mr. Noah whispered ardently, 'Don't!' and as Philip looked
at him in astonishment he added, still in a whisper, 'Pretend, can't
you? Have you never had a pretending banquet?' But before he had caught
the whisper, Philip had tried to press the edge of the leaden spoon into
the shape of jelly. And he felt that the jelly was quite hard. He went
through the form of helping himself, but it was just nothing that he put
on his plate. And he saw that Mr. Noah and Lucy and all the other guests
did the same. Presently another dish was handed to him. There was no
changing of plates. 'They _needn't_,' Philip thought bitterly. This time
it was a fat goose, not carved, and now Philip saw that it was attached
to its dish with glue. Then he understood.

(You know the beautiful but uneatable feasts which are given you in a
white cardboard box with blue binding and fine shavings to pack the
dishes and keep them from breaking? I myself, when I was little, had
such a banquet in a box. There were twelve dishes: a ham, brown and
shapely; a pair of roast chickens, also brown and more anatomical than
the ham; a glazed tongue, real tongue-shape, none of your tinned round
mysteries; a dish of sausages; two handsome fish, a little blue,
perhaps; a joint of beef, ribs I think, very red as to the lean and very
white in the fat parts; a pork pie, delicately bronzed like a traveller
in Central Africa. For sweets I had shapes, shapes of beauty, a jelly
and a cream; a Swiss roll too, and a plum pudding; asparagus there was
also and a cauliflower, and a dish of the greenest peas in all this grey
world. This was my banquet outfit. I remember that the woodenness of it
all depressed us wonderfully; the oneness of dish and food baffled all
make-believe. With the point of nurse's scissors we prised the viands
from the platters. But their wooden nature was unconquerable. One could
not pretend to eat a whole chicken any better when it was detached from
its dish, and the sausages were one solid block. And when you licked the
jelly it only tasted of glue and paint. And when we tried to re-roast
the chickens at the nursery grate, they caught fire, and then they smelt
of gasworks and india-rubber. But I am wandering. When you remember the
things that happened when you were a child, you could go on writing
about them for ever. I will put all this in brackets, and then you need
not read it if you don't want to.)

[Illustration: Mr. Noah whispered ardently, 'Don't!']

But those painted wooden foods adhering firmly to their dishes were the
kind of food of which the banquet now offered to Philip and Lucy was
composed. Only they had more dishes than I had. They had as well a
turkey, eight raspberry jam tarts, a pine-apple, a melon, a dish of
oysters in the shell, a piece of boiled bacon and a leg of mutton. But
all were equally wooden and uneatable.

Philip and Lucy, growing hungrier and hungrier, pretended with sinking
hearts to eat and enjoy the wooden feast. Wine was served in those
little goblets which they knew so well, where the double glasses
restrained and contained a red fluid which _looked_ like wine. They did
not want wine, but they were thirsty as well as hungry.

Philip wondered what the waiters were. He had plenty of time to wonder
while the long banquet went on. It was not till he saw a group of them
standing stiffly together at the end of the hall that he knew they must
be the matches with which he had once peopled a city, no other
inhabitants being at hand.

When all the dishes had been handed, speeches happened.

'Friends and fellow-citizens,' Mr. Noah began, and went on to say how
brave and clever Sir Philip was, and how likely it was that he would
turn out to be the Deliverer. Philip did not hear all this speech. He
was thinking of things to eat.

Then every one in the hall stood and shouted, and Philip found that he
was expected to take his turn at speech-making. He stood up trembling
and wretched.

'Friends and fellow-citizens,' he said, 'thank you very much. I want to
be the Deliverer, but I don't know if I can,' and sat down again amid
roars of applause.

Then there was music, from a grated gallery. And then--I cannot begin to
tell you how glad Lucy and Philip were--Mr. Noah said, once more in a
whisper, 'Cheer up! the banquet is over. _Now_ we'll have tea.'

'Tea' turned out to be bread and milk in a very cosy, blue-silk-lined
room opening out of the banqueting-hall. Only Lucy, Philip and Mr. Noah
were present. Bread and milk is very good even when you have to eat it
with the leaden spoons out of the dolls'-house basket. When it was much
later Mr. Noah suddenly said 'good-night,' and in a maze of sleepy
repletion (look that up in the dicker, will you?) the children went to
bed. Philip's bed was of gold with yellow satin curtains, and Lucy's was
made of silver, with curtains of silk that were white. But the metals
and colours made no difference to their deep and dreamless sleep.

And in the morning there was bread and milk again, and the two of them
had it in the blue room without Mr. Noah.

'Well,' said Lucy, looking up from the bowl of white floating cubes, 'do
you think you're getting to like me any better?'

'_No_,' said Philip, brief and stern like the skipper in the song.

'I wish you would,' said Lucy.

'Well, I can't,' said Philip; 'but I do want to say one thing. I'm sorry
I bunked and left you. And I did come back.'

'I know you did,' said Lucy.

'I came back to fetch you,' said Philip, 'and now we'd better get along
home.'

'You've got to do seven deeds of power before you can get home,' said
Lucy.

'Oh! I remember, Perrin told me,' said he.

'Well,' Lucy went on, 'that'll take ages. No one can go out of this
place _twice_ unless he's a King-Deliverer. You've gone out
_once_--without _me_. Before you can go again you've got to do seven
noble deeds.'

'I killed the dragon,' said Philip, modestly proud.

'That's only one,' she said; 'there are six more.' And she ate bread and
milk with firmness.

'Do you like this adventure?' he asked abruptly.

'It's more interesting than anything that ever happened to me,' she
said. 'If you were nice I should like it awfully. But as it is----'

'I'm sorry you don't think I'm nice,' said he.

'Well, what do _you_ think?' she said.

Philip reflected. He did not want not to be nice. None of us do. Though
you might not think it to see how some of us behave. True politeness, he
remembered having been told, consists in showing an interest in other
people's affairs.

'Tell me,' he said, very much wishing to be polite and nice. 'Tell me
what happened after I--after I--after you didn't come down the ladder
with me.'

'Alone and deserted,' Lucy answered promptly, 'my sworn friend having
hooked it and left me, I fell down, and both my hands were full of
gravel, and the fierce soldiery surrounded me.'

'I thought you were coming just behind me,' said Philip, frowning.

'Well, I wasn't.'

'And then.'

'Well, then---- You _were_ silly not to stay. They surrounded me--the
soldiers, I mean--and the captain said, "Tell me the truth. Are you a
Destroyer or a Deliverer?" So, of course, I said I wasn't a destroyer,
whatever I was; and then they took me to the palace and said I could be
a Princess till the Deliverer King turned up. They said,' she giggled
gaily, 'that my hair was the hair of a Deliverer and not of a Destroyer,
and I've been most awfully happy ever since. Have you?'

'No,' said Philip, remembering the miserable feeling of having been a
coward and a sneak that had come upon him when he found that he had
saved his own skin and left Lucy alone in an unknown and dangerous
world; 'not exactly happy, I shouldn't call it.'

'It's beautiful being a Princess,' said Lucy. 'I wonder what your next
noble deed will be. I wonder whether I could help you with it?' She
looked wistfully at him.

'If I'm going to do noble deeds I'll do them. I don't want any help,
thank you, especially from girls,' he answered.

'I wish you did,' said Lucy, and finished her bread and milk.

Philip's bowl also was empty. He stretched arms and legs and neck.

'It is rum,' he said; 'before this began I never thought a thing like
this _could_ begin, did you?'

'I don't know,' she said, 'everything's very wonderful. I've always been
expecting things to be more wonderful than they ever have been. You get
sort of hints and nudges, you know. Fairy tales--yes, and dreams, you
can't help feeling they must mean _something_. And your sister and my
daddy; the two of them being such friends when they were little, and
then parted and then getting friends again;--_that's_ like a story in a
dream, isn't it? And your building the city and me helping. And my daddy
being such a dear darling and your sister being such a darling dear. It
did make me think beautiful things were sort of likely. Didn't it you?'

'No,' said Philip; 'I mean yes,' he said, and he was in that moment
nearer to liking Lucy than he had ever been before; 'everything's very
wonderful, isn't it?'

'Ahem!' said a respectful cough behind them.

They turned to meet the calm gaze of Double-six.

'If you've quite finished breakfast, Sir Philip,' he said, 'Mr. Noah
would be pleased to see you in his office.'

'Me too?' said Lucy, before Philip could say, 'Only me, I suppose?'

'You may come too, if you wish it, your Highness,' said Double-six,
bowing stiffly.

They found Mr. Noah very busy in a little room littered with papers; he
was sitting at a table writing.

'Good-morning, Princess,' he said, 'good-morning, Sir Philip. You see me
very busy. I am trying to arrange for your next labour.'

'Do you mean my next deed of valour?' Philip asked.

'We have decided that all your deeds need not be deeds of valour,' said
Mr. Noah, fiddling with a pen. 'The strange labours of Hercules, you
remember, were some of them dangerous and some merely difficult. I have
decided that difficult things shall count. There are several things that
really _need_ doing,' he went on half to himself. 'There's the fruit
supply, and the Dwellers by the sea, and---- But that must wait. We try
to give you as much variety as possible. Yesterday's was an out-door
adventure. To-day's shall be an indoor amusement. I say to-day's but I
confess that I think it not unlikely that the task I am now about to set
the candidate for the post of King-Deliverer, the task, I say, which I
am now about to set you, may, quite possibly, occupy some days, if not
weeks of your valuable time.'

'But our people at home,' said Philip. 'It isn't that I'm afraid, really
and truly it isn't, but they'll go out of their minds, not knowing
what's become of us. Oh, Mr. Noah! do let us go back.'

'It's all right,' said Mr. Noah. 'However long you stay here time won't
move with them. I thought I'd explained that to you.'

'But you said----'

'I said you'd set our clocks to the time of _your_ world when you
deserted your little friend. But when you had come back for her, and
rescued her from the dragon, the clocks went their own time again.
There's only just that time missing that happened between your coming
here the second time and your killing the dragon.'

'I see,' said Philip. But he didn't. I only hope _you_ do.

'You can take your time about this new job,' said Mr. Noah, 'and you may
get any help you like. I shan't consider you've failed till you've been
at it three months. After that the Pretenderette would be entitled to
_her_ chance.'

'If you're quite sure that the time here doesn't count at home,' said
Philip, 'what is it, please, that we've got to do?'

'The greatest intellects of our country have for many ages occupied
themselves with the problem which you are now asked to solve,' said Mr.
Noah. 'Your late gaoler, Mr. Bacon-Shakespeare, has written no less than
twenty-seven volumes, all in cypher, on this very subject. But as he has
forgotten what cypher he used, and no one else ever knew it, his volumes
are of but little use to us.'

'I see,' said Philip. And again he didn't.

Mr. Noah rose to his full height, and when he stood up the children
looked very small beside him.

'Now,' he said, 'I will tell you what it is that you must do. I should
like to decree that your second labour should be the tidying up of this
room--_all_ these papers are prophecies relating to the Deliverer--but
it is one of our laws that the judge must not use any public matter for
his own personal benefit. So I have decided that the next labour shall
be the disentangling of the Mazy Carpet. It is in the Pillared Hall of
Public Amusements. I will get my hat and we will go there at once. I
can tell you about it as we go.'

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