第 一 章 · The Psammead

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THE PSAMMEAD

There were once four children who spent their summer holidays in a

white house, happily situated between a sandpit and a chalkpit. One day

they had the good fortune to find in the sandpit a strange creature.

Its eyes were on long horns like snail’s eyes, and it could move them

in and out like telescopes. It had ears like a bat’s ears, and its

tubby body was shaped like a spider’s and covered with thick soft

fur—and it had hands and feet like a monkey’s. It told the

children—whose names were Cyril, Robert, Anthea, and Jane—that it was a

Psammead or sand-fairy. (Psammead is pronounced Sammy-ad.) It was old,

old, old, and its birthday was almost at the very beginning of

everything. And it had been buried in the sand for thousands of years.

But it still kept its fairylikeness, and part of this fairylikeness was

its power to give people whatever they wished for. You know fairies

have always been able to do this. Cyril, Robert, Anthea, and Jane now

found their wishes come true; but, somehow, they never could think of

just the right things to wish for, and their wishes sometimes turned

out very oddly indeed. In the end their unwise wishings landed them in

what Robert called “a very tight place indeed”, and the Psammead

consented to help them out of it in return for their promise never

never to ask it to grant them any more wishes, and never to tell anyone

about it, because it did not want to be bothered to give wishes to

anyone ever any more. At the moment of parting Jane said politely—

“I wish we were going to see you again some day.”

And the Psammead, touched by this friendly thought, granted the wish.

The book about all this is called _Five Children and It_, and it ends

up in a most tiresome way by saying—

“The children _did_ see the Psammead again, but it was not in the

sandpit; it was—but I must say no more—”

The reason that nothing more could be said was that I had not then been

able to find out exactly when and where the children met the Psammead

again. Of course I knew they would meet it, because it was a beast of

its word, and when it said a thing would happen, that thing happened

without fail. How different from the people who tell us about what

weather it is going to be on Thursday next, in London, the South Coast,

and Channel!

The summer holidays during which the Psammead had been found and the

wishes given had been wonderful holidays in the country, and the

children had the highest hopes of just such another holiday for the

next summer. The winter holidays were beguiled by the wonderful

happenings of _The Phœnix and the Carpet_, and the loss of these two

treasures would have left the children in despair, but for the splendid

hope of their next holiday in the country. The world, they felt, and

indeed had some reason to feel, was full of wonderful things—and they

were really the sort of people that wonderful things happen to. So they

looked forward to the summer holiday; but when it came everything was

different, and very, very horrid. Father had to go out to Manchuria to

telegraph news about the war to the tiresome paper he wrote for—the

_Daily Bellower_, or something like that, was its name. And Mother,

poor dear Mother, was away in Madeira, because she had been very ill.

And The Lamb—I mean the baby—was with her. And Aunt Emma, who was

Mother’s sister, had suddenly married Uncle Reginald, who was Father’s

brother, and they had gone to China, which is much too far off for you

to expect to be asked to spend the holidays in, however fond your aunt

and uncle may be of you. So the children were left in the care of old

Nurse, who lived in Fitzroy Street, near the British Museum, and though

she was always very kind to them, and indeed spoiled them far more than

would be good for the most grown-up of us, the four children felt

perfectly wretched, and when the cab had driven off with Father and all

his boxes and guns and the sheepskin, with blankets and the aluminium

mess-kit inside it, the stoutest heart quailed, and the girls broke

down altogether, and sobbed in each other’s arms, while the boys each

looked out of one of the long gloomy windows of the parlour, and tried

to pretend that no boy would be such a muff as to cry.

I hope you notice that they were not cowardly enough to cry till their

Father had gone; they knew he had quite enough to upset him without

that. But when he was gone everyone felt as if it had been trying not

to cry all its life, and that it must cry now, if it died for it. So

they cried.

Tea—with shrimps and watercress—cheered them a little. The watercress

was arranged in a hedge round a fat glass salt-cellar, a tasteful

device they had never seen before. But it was not a cheerful meal.

After tea Anthea went up to the room that had been Father’s, and when

she saw how dreadfully he wasn’t there, and remembered how every minute

was taking him further and further from her, and nearer and nearer to

the guns of the Russians, she cried a little more. Then she thought of

Mother, ill and alone, and perhaps at that very moment wanting a little

girl to put eau-de-cologne on her head, and make her sudden cups of

tea, and she cried more than ever. And then she remembered what Mother

had said, the night before she went away, about Anthea being the eldest

girl, and about trying to make the others happy, and things like that.

So she stopped crying, and thought instead. And when she had thought as

long as she could bear she washed her face and combed her hair, and

went down to the others, trying her best to look as though crying were

an exercise she had never even heard of.

She found the parlour in deepest gloom, hardly relieved at all by the

efforts of Robert, who, to make the time pass, was pulling Jane’s

hair—not hard, but just enough to tease.

“Look here,” said Anthea. “Let’s have a palaver.” This word dated from

the awful day when Cyril had carelessly wished that there were Red

Indians in England—and there had been. The word brought back memories

of last summer holidays and everyone groaned; they thought of the white

house with the beautiful tangled garden—late roses, asters, marigold,

sweet mignonette, and feathery asparagus—of the wilderness which

someone had once meant to make into an orchard, but which was now, as

Father said, “five acres of thistles haunted by the ghosts of baby

cherry-trees”. They thought of the view across the valley, where the

lime-kilns looked like Aladdin’s palaces in the sunshine, and they

thought of their own sandpit, with its fringe of yellowy grasses and

pale-stringy-stalked wild flowers, and the little holes in the cliff

that were the little sand-martins’ little front doors. And they thought

of the free fresh air smelling of thyme and sweetbriar, and the scent

of the wood-smoke from the cottages in the lane—and they looked round

old Nurse’s stuffy parlour, and Jane said—

“Oh, how different it all is!”

It was. Old Nurse had been in the habit of letting lodgings, till

Father gave her the children to take care of. And her rooms were

furnished “for letting”. Now it is a very odd thing that no one ever

seems to furnish a room “for letting” in a bit the same way as one

would furnish it for living in. This room had heavy dark red stuff

curtains—the colour that blood would not make a stain on—with coarse

lace curtains inside. The carpet was yellow, and violet, with bits of

grey and brown oilcloth in odd places. The fireplace had shavings and

tinsel in it. There was a very varnished mahogany chiffonier, or

sideboard, with a lock that wouldn’t act. There were hard chairs—far

too many of them—with crochet antimacassars slipping off their seats,

all of which sloped the wrong way. The table wore a cloth of a cruel

green colour with a yellow chain-stitch pattern round it. Over the

fireplace was a looking-glass that made you look much uglier than you

really were, however plain you might be to begin with. Then there was a

mantelboard with maroon plush and wool fringe that did not match the

plush; a dreary clock like a black marble tomb—it was silent as the

grave too, for it had long since forgotten how to tick. And there were

painted glass vases that never had any flowers in, and a painted

tambourine that no one ever played, and painted brackets with nothing

on them.

“And maple-framed engravings of the Queen,

The Houses of Parliament, the Plains of Heaven,

And of a blunt-nosed woodman’s flat return.”

There were two books—last December’s _Bradshaw_, and an odd volume of

Plumridge’s _Commentary on Thessalonians_. There were—but I cannot

dwell longer on this painful picture. It was indeed, as Jane said, very

different.

“Let’s have a palaver,” said Anthea again.

“What about?” said Cyril, yawning.

“There’s nothing to have _anything_ about,” said Robert kicking the leg

of the table miserably.

“I don’t want to play,” said Jane, and her tone was grumpy.

Anthea tried very hard not to be cross. She succeeded.

“Look here,” she said, “don’t think I want to be preachy or a beast in

any way, but I want to what Father calls define the situation. Do you

agree?”

“Fire ahead,” said Cyril without enthusiasm.

“Well then. We all know the reason we’re staying here is because Nurse

couldn’t leave her house on account of the poor learned gentleman on

the top-floor. And there was no one else Father could entrust to take

care of us—and you know it’s taken a lot of money, Mother’s going to

Madeira to be made well.”

Jane sniffed miserably.

“Yes, I know,” said Anthea in a hurry, “but don’t let’s think about how

horrid it all is. I mean we can’t go to things that cost a lot, but we

must do _something_. And I know there are heaps of things you can see

in London without paying for them, and I thought we’d go and see them.

We are all quite old now, and we haven’t got The Lamb—”

Jane sniffed harder than before.

“I mean no one can say ‘No’ because of him, dear pet. And I thought we

_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 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,” said the man with bitter politeness; “I wish

you “ad, I’m sure!”

Anthea’s hand was on the counter, something seemed to slide under it.

She lifted it. There lay five bright half sovereigns.

“Why, I _have_ got it after all,” she said; “here’s the money, now

let’s have the Sammy,... the monkey I mean.”

The dealer looked hard at the money, but he made haste to put it in his

pocket.

“I only hope you come by it honest,” he said, shrugging his shoulders.

He scratched his ear again.

“Well!” he said, “I suppose I must let you have it, but it’s worth

thribble the money, so it is—”

He slowly led the way out to the hutch—opened the door gingerly, and

made a sudden fierce grab at the Psammead, which the Psammead

acknowledged in one last long lingering bite.

“Here, take the brute,” said the shopman, squeezing the Psammead so

tight that he nearly choked it. “It’s bit me to the marrow, it have.”

The man’s eyes opened as Anthea held out her arms. “Don’t blame me if

it tears your face off its bones,” he said, and the Psammead made a

leap from his dirty horny hands, and Anthea caught it in hers, which

were not very clean, certainly, but at any rate were soft and pink, and

held it kindly and closely.

“But you can’t take it home like that,” Cyril said, “we shall have a

crowd after us,” and indeed two errand boys and a policeman had already

collected.

“I can’t give you nothink only a paper-bag, like what we put the

tortoises in,” said the man grudgingly.

So the whole party went into the shop, and the shopman’s eyes nearly

came out of his head when, having given Anthea the largest paper-bag he

could find, he saw her hold it open, and the Psammead carefully creep

into it.

“Well!” he said, “if that there don’t beat cockfighting! But p’raps

you’ve met the brute afore.”

“Yes,” said Cyril affably, “he’s an old friend of ours.”

“If I’d a known that,” the man rejoined, “you shouldn’t a had him under

twice the money. ’Owever,” he added, as the children disappeared, “I

ain’t done so bad, seeing as I only give five bob for the beast. But

then there’s the bites to take into account!”

The children trembling in agitation and excitement, carried home the

Psammead, trembling in its paper-bag.

When they got it home, Anthea nursed it, and stroked it, and would have

cried over it, if she hadn’t remembered how it hated to be wet.

When it recovered enough to speak, it said—

“Get me sand; silver sand from the oil and colour shop. And get me

plenty.”

They got the sand, and they put it and the Psammead in the round bath

together, and it rubbed itself, and rolled itself, and shook itself and

scraped itself, and scratched itself, and preened itself, till it felt

clean and comfy, and then it scrabbled a hasty hole in the sand, and

went to sleep in it.

The children hid the bath under the girls’ bed, and had supper. Old

Nurse had got them a lovely supper of bread and butter and fried

onions. She was full of kind and delicate thoughts.

When Anthea woke the next morning, the Psammead was snuggling down

between her shoulder and Jane’s.

“You have saved my life,” it said. “I know that man would have thrown

cold water on me sooner or later, and then I should have died. I saw

him wash out a guinea-pig’s hutch yesterday morning. I’m still

frightfully sleepy, I think I’ll go back to sand for another nap. Wake

the boys and this dormouse of a Jane, and when you’ve had your

breakfasts we’ll have a talk.”

“Don’t _you_ want any breakfast?” asked Anthea.

“I daresay I shall pick a bit presently,” it said; “but sand is all I

care about—it’s meat and drink to me, and coals and fire and wife and

children.” With these words it clambered down by the bedclothes and

scrambled back into the bath, where they heard it scratching itself out

of sight.

“Well!” said Anthea, “anyhow our holidays won’t be dull _now_. We’ve

found the Psammead again.”

“No,” said Jane, beginning to put on her stockings. “We shan’t be

_dull_—but it’ll be only like having a pet dog now it can’t give us

wishes.”

“Oh, don’t be so discontented,” said Anthea. “If it can’t do anything

else it can tell us about Megatheriums and things.”