The Story of the Amulet, E. Nesbit [free children's online books TXT] 📗

>Between Fitzroy Street and St James’s Park there are a great many streets, and, if you go the right way you will pass a great many shops that you cannot possibly help stopping to look at. The children stopped to look at several with gold-lace and beads and pictures and jewellery and dresses, and hats, and oysters and lobsters in their windows, and their sorrow did not seem nearly so impossible to bear as it had done in the best parlour at No. 300, Fitzroy Street.

Presently, by some wonderful chance turn of Robert’s (who had been voted Captain because the girls thought it would be good for him— and indeed he thought so himself—and of course Cyril couldn’t vote against him because it would have looked like a mean jealousy), they came into the little interesting criss-crossy streets that held the most interesting shops of all—the shops where live things were sold. There was one shop window entirely filled with cages, and all sorts of beautiful birds in them. The children were delighted till they remembered how they had once wished for wings themselves, and had had them—and then they felt how desperately unhappy anything with wings must be if it is shut up in a cage and not allowed to fly.

‘It must be fairly beastly to be a bird in a cage,’ said Cyril. ‘Come on!’

They went on, and Cyril tried to think out a scheme for making his fortune as a gold-digger at Klondyke, and then buying all the caged birds in the world and setting them free. Then they came to a shop that sold cats, but the cats were in cages, and the children could not help wishing someone would buy all the cats and put them on hearthrugs, which are the proper places for cats. And there was the dog-shop, and that was not a happy thing to look at either, because all the dogs were chained or caged, and all the dogs, big and little, looked at the four children with sad wistful eyes and wagged beseeching tails as if they were trying to say, ‘Buy me! buy me! buy me! and let me go for a walk with you; oh, do buy me, and buy my poor brothers too! Do! do! do!’ They almost said, ‘Do! do! do!’ plain to the ear, as they whined; all but one big Irish terrier, and he growled when Jane patted him.

‘Grrrrr,’ he seemed to say, as he looked at them from the back corner of his eye—‘YOU won’t buy me. Nobody will—ever—I shall die chained up—and I don’t know that I care how soon it is, either!’

I don’t know that the children would have understood all this, only once they had been in a besieged castle, so they knew how hateful it is to be kept in when you want to get out.

Of course they could not buy any of the dogs. They did, indeed, ask the price of the very, very smallest, and it was sixty-five pounds—but that was because it was a Japanese toy spaniel like the Queen once had her portrait painted with, when she was only Princess of Wales. But the children thought, if the smallest was all that money, the biggest would run into thousands—so they went on.

And they did not stop at any more cat or dog or bird shops, but passed them by, and at last they came to a shop that seemed as though it only sold creatures that did not much mind where they were—such as goldfish and white mice, and sea-anemones and other aquarium beasts, and lizards and toads, and hedgehogs and tortoises, and tame rabbits and guinea-pigs. And there they stopped for a long time, and fed the guinea-pigs with bits of bread through the cage-bars, and wondered whether it would be possible to keep a sandy-coloured double-lop in the basement of the house in Fitzroy Street.

‘I don’t suppose old Nurse would mind VERY much,’ said Jane. ‘Rabbits are most awfully tame sometimes. I expect it would know her voice and follow her all about.’

‘She’d tumble over it twenty times a day,’ said Cyril; ‘now a snake—’

‘There aren’t any snakes, said Robert hastily, ‘and besides, I never could cotton to snakes somehow—I wonder why.’

‘Worms are as bad,’ said Anthea, ‘and eels and slugs—I think it’s because we don’t like things that haven’t got legs.’

‘Father says snakes have got legs hidden away inside of them,’ said Robert.

‘Yes—and he says WE’VE got tails hidden away inside us—but it doesn’t either of it come to anything REALLY,’ said Anthea. ‘I hate things that haven’t any legs.’

‘It’s worse when they have too many,’ said Jane with a shudder, ‘think of centipedes!’

They stood there on the pavement, a cause of some inconvenience to the passersby, and thus beguiled the time with conversation. Cyril was leaning his elbow on the top of a hutch that had seemed empty when they had inspected the whole edifice of hutches one by one, and he was trying to reawaken the interest of a hedgehog that had curled itself into a ball earlier in the interview, when a small, soft voice just below his elbow said, quietly, plainly and quite unmistakably—not in any squeak or whine that had to be translated—but in downright common English—

‘Buy me—do—please buy me!’

Cyril started as though he had been pinched, and jumped a yard away from the hutch.

‘Come back—oh, come back!’ said the voice, rather louder but still softly; ‘stoop down and pretend to be tying up your bootlace—I see it’s undone, as usual.’

Cyril mechanically obeyed. He knelt on one knee on the dry, hot dusty pavement, peered into the darkness of the hutch and found himself face to face with—the Psammead!

It seemed much thinner than when he had last seen it. It was dusty and dirty, and its fur was untidy and ragged. It had hunched itself up into a miserable lump, and its long snail’s eyes were drawn in quite tight so that they hardly showed at all.

‘Listen,’ said the Psammead, in a voice that sounded as though it would begin to cry in a minute, ‘I don’t think the creature who keeps this shop will ask a very high price for me. I’ve bitten him more than once, and I’ve made myself look as common as I can. He’s never had a glance from my beautiful, beautiful eyes. Tell the others I’m here—but tell them to look at some of those low, common beasts while I’m talking to you. The creature inside mustn’t think you care much about me, or he’ll put a price upon me far, far beyond your means. I remember in the dear old days last summer you never had much money. Oh—I never thought I should be so glad to see you—I never did.’ It sniffed, and shot out its long snail’s eyes expressly to drop a tear well away from its fur. ‘Tell the others I’m here, and then I’ll tell you exactly what to do about buying me.’ Cyril tied his bootlace into a hard knot, stood up and addressed the others in firm tones—

‘Look here,’ he said, ‘I’m not kidding—and I appeal to your honour,’ an appeal which in this family was never made in vain. ‘Don’t look at that hutch—look at the white rat. Now you are not to look at that hutch whatever I say.’

He stood in front of it to prevent mistakes.

‘Now get yourselves ready for a great surprise. In that hutch there’s an old friend of ours—DON’T look!—Yes; it’s the Psammead, the good old Psammead! it wants us to buy it. It says you’re not to look at it. Look at the white rat and count your money! On your honour don’t look!’

The others responded nobly. They looked at the white rat till they quite stared him out of countenance, so that he went and sat up on his hind legs in a far corner and hid his eyes with his front paws, and pretended he was washing his face.

Cyril stooped again, busying himself with the other bootlace and listened for the Psammead’s further instructions.

‘Go in,’ said the Psammead, ‘and ask the price of lots of other things. Then say, “What do you want for that monkey that’s lost its tail—the mangy old thing in the third hutch from the end.” Oh—don’t mind MY feelings—call me a mangy monkey—I’ve tried hard enough to look like one! I don’t think he’ll put a high price on me—I’ve bitten him eleven times since I came here the day before yesterday. If he names a bigger price than you can afford, say you wish you had the money.’

‘But you can’t give us wishes. I’ve promised never to have another wish from you,’ said the bewildered Cyril.

‘Don’t be a silly little idiot,’ said the Sand-fairy in trembling but affectionate tones, ‘but find out how much money you’ve got between you, and do exactly what I tell you.’

Cyril, pointing a stiff and unmeaning finger at the white rat, so as to pretend that its charms alone employed his tongue, explained matters to the others, while the Psammead hunched itself, and bunched itself, and did its very best to make itself look uninteresting. Then the four children filed into the shop.

‘How much do you want for that white rat?’ asked Cyril.

‘Eightpence,’ was the answer.

‘And the guinea-pigs?’

‘Eighteenpence to five bob, according to the breed.’

‘And the lizards?’

‘Ninepence each.’

‘And toads?’

‘Fourpence. Now look here,’ said the greasy owner of all this caged life with a sudden ferocity which made the whole party back hurriedly on to the wainscoting of hutches with which the shop was lined. ‘Lookee here. I ain’t agoin’ to have you a comin’ in here a turnin’ the whole place outer winder, an’ prizing every animile in the stock just for your larks, so don’t think it! If you’re a buyer, BE a buyer—but I never had a customer yet as wanted to buy mice, and lizards, and toads, and guineas all at once. So hout you goes.’

‘Oh! wait a minute,’ said the wretched Cyril, feeling how foolishly yet well-meaningly he had carried out the Psammead’s instructions. ‘Just tell me one thing. What do you want for the mangy old monkey in the third hutch from the end?’

The shopman only saw in this a new insult.

‘Mangy young monkey yourself,’ said he; ‘get along with your blooming cheek. Hout you goes!’

‘Oh! don’t be so cross,’ said Jane, losing her head altogether, ‘don’t you see he really DOES want to know THAT!’

‘Ho! does ‘e indeed,’ sneered the merchant. Then he scratched his ear suspiciously, for he was a sharp business man, and he knew the ring of truth when he heard it. His hand was bandaged, and three minutes before he would have been glad to sell the ‘mangy old monkey’ for ten shillings. Now— ‘Ho! ‘e does, does ‘e,’ he said, ‘then two pun ten’s my price. He’s not got his fellow that monkey ain’t, nor yet his match, not this side of the equator, which he comes from. And the only one ever seen in London. Ought to be in the Zoo. Two pun ten, down on the nail, or hout you goes!’

The children looked at each other—twenty-three shillings and fivepence was all they had in the world, and it would have been merely three and fivepence, but for the sovereign which Father had given to them ‘between them’ at parting. ‘We’ve only twenty-three shillings and fivepence,’ said Cyril, rattling the money in his pocket.

‘Twenty-three farthings and somebody’s own cheek,’ said the dealer, for he did not believe that Cyril had so much money.

There was a miserable pause. Then Anthea remembered, and said—

‘Oh! I WISH I had two pounds ten.’

‘So do I, Miss, I’m sure,’