Nine Unlikely Tales. E. Nesbit

the Princess was as fat as any Princess ought to be, Matilda went to her one day, and threw her arms round her and kissed her. The Princess kissed her back, and said, “Very well, I am sorry then, but I didn’t want to say so, but now I will. And the Cockatoucan never laughs except when he’s tickled. So there! He hates to laugh.”

      “And you won’t do it again,” said Matilda, “will you?”

      “No, of course not,” said the Princess, very much surprised, “why should I? I was spiteful when I was thin, but now I’m fat again I want every one to be happy.”

      “But how can any one be happy?” asked Matilda, severely, “when every one is turned into something they weren’t meant to be? There’s your dear father—he’s a desirable villa—the Prime Minister was a little boy, and he got back again, and now he’s turned into a Comic Opera. Half the Palace housemaids are breakers, dashing themselves against the Palace crockery: the Navy, to a man, are changed to French poodles, and the Army to German sausages. Your favourite nurse is now a flourishing steam laundry, and I, alas! am too clever by half. Can’t that horrible bird do anything to put us all right again?”

      “No,” said the Princess, dissolved in tears at this awful picture, “he told me once himself that when he laughed he could only change one or two things at once, and then, as often as not, it turned out to be something he didn’t expect. The only way to make everything come right again would be—but it can’t be done! If we could only make him laugh on the wrong side of his mouth. That’s the secret. He told me so. But I don’t know what it is, let alone being able to do it. Could you do it, Matilda?”

      “No,” said Matilda, “but let me whisper. He’s listening. Pridmore could. She’s often told me she’d do it to me. But she never has. Oh, Princess, I’ve got an idea.”

      The two were whispering so low that the Cockatoucan could not hear, though he tried his hardest. Matilda and the Princess left him listening.

      Presently he heard a sound of wheels. Four men came into the rose-garden wheeling a great red thing in a barrow. They set it down in front of the Cockatoucan, who danced on his perch with rage.

      “Oh,” he said, “if only some one would make me laugh, that horrible thing would be the one to change. I know it would. It would change into something much horrider than it is now. I feel it in all my feathers.”

      The Princess opened the cage-door with the Prime Minister’s key, which a tenor singer had found at the beginning of his music. It was also the key of the comic opera. She crept up behind the Cockatoucan and tickled him under both wings. He fixed his baleful eye on the red Automatic Machine and laughed long and loud; he saw the red iron[43]

       [44]

       [45] and glass change before his eyes into the form of Pridmore. Her cheeks were red with rage and her eyes shone like glass with fury.

      FOUR MEN CAME WHEELING A GREAT RED THING ON A BARROW.

      “Nice manners!” said she to the Cockatoucan, “what are you laughing at, I should like to know—I’ll make you laugh on the wrong side of your mouth, my fine fellow!”

      She sprang into the cage, and then and there, before the astonished Court, she shook that Cockatoucan till he really and truly did laugh on the wrong side of his mouth. It was a terrible sight to witness, and the sound of that wrong-sided laughter was horrible to hear.

      But instantly all the things changed back as if by magic to what they had been before. The laundry became a nurse, the villa became a king, the other people were just what they had been before, and all Matilda’s wonderful cleverness went out like the snuff of a candle.

      The Cockatoucan himself fell in two—one half of him became a common, ordinary Toucan, such as you must have seen a hundred times at the Zoo, unless you are unworthy to visit that happy place, and the other half became a weathercock, which, as you know, is always changing and makes the wind change too. So he has not quite lost his old power. Only now he is in halves, any power he may have has to be used without laughing. The poor, broken Cockatoucan, like King you-know-who in English history, has never since that sad day smiled again.

      The grateful King sent an escort of the whole Army, now no longer dressed in sausage skins, but in uniforms of dazzling beauty, with drums and banners, to see Matilda and Pridmore home. But Matilda was very sleepy. She had been clever for so long that she was quite tired out. It is indeed a very fatiguing thing, as no doubt you know. And the soldiers must have been sleepy too, for one by one the whole Army disappeared, and by the time Pridmore and Matilda reached home there was only one left, and he was the policeman at the corner.

      The next day Matilda began to talk to Pridmore about the Green Land and the Cockatoucan and the Villa-residence-King, but Pridmore only said—

      “Pack of nonsense! Hold your tongue, do!”

      So Matilda naturally understood that Pridmore did not wish to be reminded of the time when she was an Automatic Nagging Machine, so of course, like a kind and polite little girl, she let the subject drop.

      Matilda did not mention her adventures to the others at home because she saw that they believed her to have spent the time with her Great-aunt Willoughby.

      And she knew if she had said that she had not been there she would be sent at once—and she did not wish this.

      She has often tried to get Pridmore to take the wrong omnibus again, which is the only way she knows of getting to the Green Land; but only once has she been successful, and then the omnibus did not go to the Green Land at all, but to the Elephant and Castle.

      But no little girl ought to expect to go to the Green Land more than once in a lifetime. Many of us indeed are not even so fortunate as to go there once.