Five Children and It
grown up he's a demon--simply. I can see it. Look at his mouth."
"Well then," said Robert, "let's wake him up and see what _he'll_ do.
Perhaps _he'll_ take _us_ to Maidstone and stand treat. He ought to have
a lot of money in the pockets of those extra-special pants. We _must_
have dinner, anyway."
They drew lots with little bits of brake fern. It fell to Jane's lot to
waken the grown-up Lamb.
She did it gently by tickling his nose with a twig of honeysuckle. He
said "Bother the flies!" twice, and then opened his eyes.
"Hullo, kiddies!" he said in a languid tone, "still here? What's the
giddy hour? You'll be late for your grub!"
"I know we shall," said Robert bitterly.
"Then cut along home," said the grown-up Lamb.
"What about your grub, though?" asked Jane.
"Oh, how far is it to the station, do you think? I've a sort of a notion
that I'll run up to town and have some lunch at the club."
Blank misery fell like a pall on the four others. The
Lamb--alone--unattended--would go to town and have lunch at a club!
Perhaps he would also have tea there. Perhaps sunset would come upon him
amid the dazzling luxury of club-land, and a helpless cross sleepy
baby would find itself alone amid unsympathetic waiters, and would wail
miserably for "Panty" from the depths of a club arm-chair! The picture
moved Anthea almost to tears.
"Oh no, Lamb ducky, you mustn't do that!" she cried incautiously.
The grown-up Lamb frowned. "My dear Anthea," he said, "how often am I to
tell you that my name is Hilary or St. Maur or Devereux?--any of my
baptismal names are free to my little brothers and sisters, but _not_
'Lamb'--a relic of foolishness and far-off childhood."
This was awful. He was their elder brother now, was he? Well of course
he was, if he was grown-up--since they weren't. Thus, in whispers,
Anthea and Robert.
But the almost daily adventures resulting from the Psammead's wishes
were making the children wise beyond their years.
"Dear Hilary," said Anthea, and the others choked at the name, "you know
father didn't wish you to go to London. He wouldn't like us to be left
alone without you to take care of us. Oh, deceitful thing that I am!"
she added to herself.
"Look here," said Cyril, "if you're our elder brother, why not behave as
sich and take us over to Maidstone and give us a jolly good blow-out,
and we'll go on the river afterwards?"
"I'm infinitely obliged to you," said the Lamb courteously, "but I
should prefer solitude. Go home to your lunch--I mean your dinner.
Perhaps I may look in about tea-time--or I may not be home till after
you are in your beds."
Their beds! Speaking glances flashed between the wretched four. Much bed
there would be for them if they went home without the Lamb.
"We promised mother not to lose sight of you if we took you out," Jane
said before the others could stop her.
"Look here, Jane," said the grown-up Lamb, putting his hands in his
pockets and looking down at her, "little girls should be seen and not
heard. You kids must learn not to make yourselves a nuisance. Run along
home now--and perhaps, if you're good, I'll give you each a penny
to-morrow."
"Look here," said Cyril, in the best "man to man" tone at his command,
"where are you going, old man? You might let Bobs and me come with
you--even if you don't want the girls."
This was really rather noble of Cyril, for he never did care much about
being seen in public with the Lamb, who of course after sunset would be
a baby again.
The "man to man" tone succeeded.
"I shall run over to Maidstone on my bike," said the new Lamb airily,
fingering the little black mustache. "I can lunch at The Crown--and
perhaps I'll have a pull on the river; but I can't take you all on the
machine--now, can I? Run along home, like good children."
The position was desperate. Robert exchanged a despairing look with
Cyril. Anthea detached a pin from her waistband, a pin whose withdrawal
left a gaping chasm between skirt and bodice, and handed it furtively to
Robert--with a grimace of the darkest and deepest meaning. Robert
slipped away to the road. There, sure enough, stood a bicycle--a
beautiful new one. Of course Robert understood at once that if the Lamb
was grown up he _must_ have a bicycle.
This had always been one of Robert's own reasons for wishing to be
grown-up. He hastily began to use the pin--eleven punctures in the back
tyre, seven in the front. He would have made the total twenty-two but
for the rustling of the yellow hazel-leaves, which warned him of the
approach of the others. He hastily leaned a hand on each wheel, and was
rewarded by the "whish" of the what was left of air escaping from
eighteen neat pin-holes.
"Your bike's run down," said Robert, wondering how he could so soon have
learned to deceive.
"So it is," said Cyril.
"It's a puncture," said Anthea, stooping down, and standing up again
with a thorn which she had got ready for the purpose.
"Look here."
The grown-up Lamb (or Hilary, as I suppose one must now call him) fixed
his pump and blew up the tyre. The punctured state of it was soon
evident.
"I suppose there's a cottage somewhere near--where one could get a pail
of water?" said the Lamb.
There was; and when the number of punctures had been made manifest, it
was felt to be a special blessing that the cottage provided "teas for
cyclists." It provided an odd sort of tea-and-hammy meal for the Lamb
and his brothers. This was paid for out of the fifteen shillings which
had been earned by Robert when he was a giant--for the Lamb, it
appeared, had unfortunately no money about him. This was a great
disappointment for the others; but it is a thing that will happen, even
to the most grown-up of us. However, Robert had enough to eat, and that
was something. Quietly but persistently the miserable four took it in
turns to try and persuade the Lamb (or St. Maur) to spend the rest of
the day in the woods. There was not very much of the day left by the
time he had mended the eighteenth puncture. He looked up from the
completed work with a sigh of relief, and suddenly put his tie straight.
"There's a lady coming," he said briskly,--"for goodness' sake, get out
of the way. Go home--hide--vanish somehow! I can't be seen with a pack
of dirty kids." His brothers and sisters were indeed rather dirty,
because, earlier in the day, the Lamb, in his infant state, had
sprinkled a good deal of garden soil over them. The grown-up Lamb's
voice was so tyrant-like, as Jane said afterwards, that they actually
retreated to the back garden, and left him with his little mustache and
his flannel suit to meet alone the young lady, who now came up the front
garden wheeling a bicycle.
The woman of the house came out, and the young lady spoke to her,--the
Lamb raised his hat as she passed him,--and the children could not hear
what she said, though they were craning round the corner and listening
with all their ears. They felt it to be "perfectly fair," as Robert
said, "with that wretched Lamb in that condition."
When the Lamb spoke, in a languid voice heavy with politeness, they
heard well enough.
"A puncture?" he was saying. "Can I not be of any assistance? If you
could allow me----?"
There was a stifled explosion of laughter and the grown-up Lamb
(otherwise Devereux) turned the tail of an angry eye in its direction.
"You're very kind," said the lady, looking at the Lamb. She looked
rather shy, but, as the boys put it, there didn't seem to be any
nonsense about her.
"But oh," whispered Cyril, "I should have thought he'd had enough
bicycle-mending for one day--and if she only knew that really and truly
he's only a whiny-piny, silly little baby!"
"He's _not_," Anthea murmured angrily. "He's a dear--if people only let
him alone. It's our own precious Lamb still, whatever silly idiots may
turn him into--isn't he, Pussy?"
Jane doubtfully supposed so.
Now, the Lamb--whom I must try to remember to call St. Maur--was
examining the lady's bicycle and talking to her with a very grown-up
manner indeed. No one could possibly have supposed, to see and hear him,
that only that very morning he had been a chubby child of two years
breaking other people's Waterbury watches. Devereux (as he ought to be
called for the future) took out a gold watch when he had mended the
lady's bicycle, and all the hidden onlookers said "Oh!"--because it
seemed so unfair that the Baby, who had only that morning destroyed two
cheap but honest watches, should now, in the grown-upness to which
Cyril's folly had raised him, have a real gold watch--with a chain and
seals!
Hilary (as I will now term him) withered his brothers and sisters with a
glance, and then said to the lady--with whom he seemed to be quite
friendly--
"If you will allow me, I will ride with you as far as the Cross Roads;
it is getting late, and there are tramps about."
No one will ever know what answer the young lady intended to give to
this gallant offer, for, directly Anthea heard it made, she rushed out,
knocking against a swill pail, which overflowed in a turbid stream, and
caught the Lamb (I suppose I ought to say Hilary) by the arm. The others
followed, and in an instant the four dirty children were visible beyond
disguise.
"Don't let him," said Anthea to the lady, and she spoke with intense
earnestness; "he's not fit to go with anyone!"
"Go away, little girl!" said St. Maur (as we will now call him) in a
terrible voice.
"Go home at once!"
"You'd much better not have anything to do with him," the now reckless
Anthea went on. "He doesn't know who he is. He's something very
different from what you think he is."
"What do you mean?" asked the lady, not unnaturally, while Devereux (as
I must term the grown-up Lamb) tried vainly to push Anthea away. The
others backed her up, and she stood solid as a rock.
"You just let him go with you," said Anthea, "you'll soon see what I
mean! How would you like to suddenly see a poor little helpless baby
spinning along downhill beside you with its feet up on a bicycle it had
lost control of?"
The lady had turned rather pale.
"Who are these very dirty children?" she asked the grown-up Lamb
(sometimes called St. Maur in these pages).
"I don't know," he lied miserably.
"Oh, Lamb! how _can_ you?" cried Jane,--"when you know perfectly well
you're our own little baby brother that we're so fond of. We're his big
brothers and sisters," she explained, turning to the lady, who with
trembling hands was now turning her bicycle towards the gate, "and we've
got to take care of him. And we must get him home before sunset, or I
don't know whatever will become of us. You see, he's sort of under a
spell--enchanted--you know what I mean!"
Again and again the Lamb (Devereux, I mean) had tried to stop Jane's
eloquence, but Robert and Cyril held him, one by each leg, and no proper
explanation was possible. The lady rode hastily away, and electrified
her relatives at dinner by telling them of her escape from a family of
dangerous lunatics. "The little girl's eyes were simply those of a
maniac. I can't think how she came to be at large," she said.
When her bicycle had whizzed away down the road, Cyril spoke gravely.
"Hilary, old chap," he said, "you must have had a sunstroke or
something. And the things you've been saying to that lady! Why, if we
were to tell you the things you've said when you are yourself again,
say to-morrow morning, you wouldn't ever understand them--let alone
believe them! You trust to me, old chap, and come home now, and if