must get Nurse to see how quite old we are, and let us go out by ourselves, or else we shall never have any sort of a time at all. And I vote we see everything there is, and let’s begin by asking Nurse to give us some bits of bread and we’ll go to St James’s Park. There are ducks there, I know, we can feed them. Only we must make Nurse let us go by ourselves.’
‘Hurrah for liberty!’ said Robert, ‘but she won’t.’
‘Yes she will,’ said Jane unexpectedly. ‘I thought about that this morning, and I asked Father, and he said yes; and what’s more he told old Nurse we might, only he said we must always say where we wanted to go, and if it was right she would let us.’
‘Three cheers for thoughtful Jane,’ cried Cyril, now roused at last from his yawning despair. ‘I say, let’s go now.’
So they went, old Nurse only begging them to be careful of crossings, and to ask a policeman to assist in the more difficult cases. But they were used to crossings, for they had lived in Camden Town and knew the Kentish Town Road where the trams rush up and down like mad at all hours of the day and night, and seem as though, if anything, they would rather run over you than not.
They had promised to be home by dark, but it was July, so dark would be very late indeed, and long past bedtime.
They started to walk to St James’s Park, and all their pockets were stuffed with bits of bread and the crusts of toast, to feed the ducks with. They started, I repeat, but they never got there.
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 Klondike, 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 passers-by, 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