The House of Arden, E. Nesbit [best historical fiction books of all time TXT] 📗

the door. And we did find the door. Perhaps it would tell us something new if we called it now⁠—and if it came.”

“And if it came,” said Edred.

“Don’t talk⁠—make poetry,” said Elfrida. But that was one of the things that Edred never could do. Trying to make poetry was, to him, like trying to remember a name you have never heard, or to multiply a number that you’ve forgotten by another number that you don’t recollect.

But Elfrida, that youthful poet, frowned and bit her lips and twisted her hands, and reached out in her mind to words that she just couldn’t quite think of, till the words grew tame and flew within reach, and she caught them and caged them behind the bars of rhyme. This was her poem⁠—

“Dear Mouldiwarp, do come if you can,
And tell us if there is any plan
That you can tell us of for us two
To get into the past like we used to do.
Dear Mouldiwarp, we don’t want to worry
You⁠—but we are in a frightful hurry.”

“So you be always,” said the white Mouldiwarp, suddenly appearing between them on the yellowy dry grass. “Well, well! Youth’s the season for silliness. What’s to do now? I be turble tired of all this. I wish I’d only got to give ye the treasure and go my ways. You don’t give a poor Mouldiwarp a minute’s rest. You do terrify me same’s flies, you do.”

“Is there any other way,” said Elfrida, “to get back into the past? We can’t find the door now.”

“Course you can’t,” said the mole. “That’s a chance gone, and gone forever.

“ ‘He that will not when he may,
He shall not when he would-a.’

Well, tell me where you want to go, and I’ll make you a backways-working white clock.”

“Anywhere you like,” said Edred incautiously.

“Tch, tch!” said the mole, rubbing its nose with vexation. “There’s another chance gone, and gone forever. You be terrible spending with your chances, you be. Now, answer sharp as weasel’s nose. Be there anyone in the past you’d like to see?

“ ‘If you don’t know,
Then you don’t go.’

And that’s poetry as good as yours any day of the week.”

“Cousin Richard,” said Elfrida and Edred together. This was the only name they could think of.

“Bide ye still, my dears,” said the Mouldiwarp, “and I’ll make you a white road right to where he is.”

So they sat still, all but their tongues.

“Is he in the past?” said Elfrida; “because if he is, it wasn’t much good our writing to him.”

“You hold your little tongues,” said the Mouldiwarp, “and keep your little mouths shut, and your little eyes open, and wish well to the white magic. There never was a magic yet,” the mole went on, “that was the worse for being well-wished.”

“May I say something,” said Elfrida, “without its stopping the magic?”

“Put your white handkerchief over your face and talk through it, and then you may.”

By a most fortunate and unusual chance, Elfrida’s handkerchief was white: it was, in fact, still folded in the sixteen blameless squares into which the laundress had ironed it. She threw it over her face as she lay back on the turf and spoke through it.

“I’d like to see the nurse witch again,” she said.

“Instead of Cousin Richard?”

“No: as well as.”

“That’s right,” said the magic mole. “You shouldn’t change your wishes; but there’s no rule against enlarging them⁠—on the contrary. Now look!”

Elfrida whisked away the handkerchief and looked.

Have you ever noticed the way the bath water runs away when you pull up the bath tap? Have you ever seen bottles filled through a funnel?

The white Mouldiwarp reached up its hands⁠—its front feet I ought perhaps to say⁠—towards the deep-blue sky, where white clouds herded together like giant sheep.

And it spoke. At least, it did not speak, but it sang. Yet I don’t know that you could call it singing either. It was more like the first notes that a violin yields to the bow wielded by the hand of a master musician. And the white clouds stooped to answer it. Round and round in the blue sky they circled, drawing together and swirling down, as the bath water draws and swirls when you pull up the knob labelled “Waste”⁠—round and round till they showed like a vast white funnel whose neck hung, a great ring, above the group on the dry grass of the downs. It stooped and stooped. The ring fitted down over them, they were in a white tower, narrow at its base where that base touched the grass, but widening to the blue sky overhead.

“Take hands,” cried the Mouldiwarp. “Always hold hands when there is magic about.”

The children clasped hands.

“Both hands,” said the Mouldiwarp; and each child reached out a hand, that was caught and held. Round and round, incredibly swifter and swifter, went the cloud funnel, and the voice of the mole at their feet sounded faint and far away.

“Up!” it cried, “up! Shall the very clouds dance for your delight, and you alone refrain and tread not a measure?”

The children leaped up⁠—and through the cloud came something that was certainly music, though it was so vague and far away that the sharpest music-master you ever had could not have made out the tune. But the rhythm of it was there, an insistent beat, beat, beat⁠—and a beat that made your feet long to keep time to it. And through the rhythm presently the tune pierced, as the sound of the pipes pierces the sound of the drums when you see the Church Brigade boys go by when you are on your holiday by the sea near their white-tented, happy camps. And that time the children’s feet could not resist. They danced steps that they had not known they knew. And they knew, for the first time, the delight of real dancing: none of your waltzes, or even minuets, but the dancing that means youth and gaiety, and being out for a holiday, and determined to enjoy everything to the last breath.

And as they