Five Children and It
others looked guiltily at each other, and wished the Fairy would not
keep all on about good tempers, but give them one good scolding if it
wanted to, and then have done with it.
"Well," said the Psammead, putting out his long snail's eyes so suddenly
that one of them nearly went into the round boy's eye of Robert, "let's
have the little wish first."
"We don't want the servants to notice the gifts you give us."
"Are kind enough to give us," said Anthea in a whisper.
"Are kind enough to give us, I mean," said Robert.
The Fairy swelled himself out a bit, let his breath go, and said--
"I've done _that_ for you--it was quite easy. People don't notice things
much, anyway. What's the next wish?"
"We want," said Robert slowly, "to be rich beyond the dreams of
something or other."
"Avarice," said Jane.
"So it is," said the Fairy unexpectedly. "But it won't do you much good,
that's one comfort," it muttered to itself. "Come--I can't go beyond
dreams, you know! How much do you want, and will you have it in gold or
notes?"
"Gold, please--and millions of it"--
"This gravel-pit full be enough?" said the Fairy in an off-hand manner.
"Oh _yes_"--
"Then go out before I begin, or you'll be buried alive in it."
It made its skinny arms so long, and waved them so frighteningly, that
the children ran as hard as they could towards the road by which carts
used to come to the gravel-pits. Only Anthea had presence of mind enough
to shout a timid "Good-morning, I hope your whisker will be better
to-morrow," as she ran.
On the road they turned and looked back, and they had to shut their
eyes, and open them very slowly, a little bit at a time, because the
sight was too dazzling for their eyes to be able to bear. It was
something like trying to look at the sun at high noon on Midsummer Day.
For the whole of the sand-pit was full, right up to the very top, with
new shining gold pieces, and all the little bank-martins' little front
doors were covered out of sight. Where the road for carts wound into the
gravel-pit the gold lay in heaps like stones lie by the roadside, and a
great bank of shining gold shelved down from where it lay flat and
smooth between the tall sides of the gravel-pit. And all the gleaming
heaps was minted gold. And on the sides and edges of these countless
coins the mid-day sun shone and sparkled, and glowed and gleamed till
the quarry looked like the mouth of a smelting furnace, or one of the
fairy halls that you see sometimes in the sky at sunset.
The children stood with their mouths open, and no one said a word.
At last Robert stooped and picked up one of the loose coins from the
edge of the heap by the cart-road, and looked at it. He looked on both
sides. Then he said in a low voice, quite different to his own, "It's
not sovereigns."
"It's gold, anyway," said Cyril. And now they all began to talk at once.
They all picked up the golden treasure by handfuls and let it run
through their fingers like water, and the chink it made as it fell was
wonderful music. At first they quite forgot to think of spending the
money, it was so nice to play with. Jane sat down between two heaps of
the gold, and Robert began to bury her, as you bury your father in sand
when you are at the seaside and he has gone to sleep on the beach with
his newspaper over his face. But Jane was not half buried before she
cried out, "Oh stop, it's too heavy! It hurts!"
Robert said "Bosh!" and went on.
"Let me out, I tell you," cried Jane, and was taken out, very white, and
trembling a little.
"You've no idea what it's like," said she; "it's like stones on you--or
like chains."
"Look here," Cyril said, "if this is to do us any good, it's no good our
staying gasping at it like this. Let's fill our pockets and go and buy
things. Don't you forget, it won't last after sunset. I wish we'd asked
the Sammyadd why things don't turn to stone. Perhaps this will. I'll
tell you what, there's a pony and cart in the village."
"Do you want to buy that?" asked Jane.
"No, silly,--we'll _hire_ it. And then we'll go to Rochester and buy
heaps and heaps of things. Look here, let's each take as much as we can
carry. But it's not sovereigns. They've got a man's head on one side and
a thing like the ace of spades on the other. Fill your pockets with it,
I tell you, and come along. You can talk as we go--if you _must_ talk."
Cyril sat down and began to fill his pockets.
"You made fun of me for getting father to have nine pockets in my suit,"
said he, "but now you see!"
They did. For when Cyril had filled his nine pockets and his
handkerchief and the space between himself and his shirt front with the
gold coins, he had to stand up. But he staggered, and had to sit down
again in a hurry.
"Throw out some of the cargo," said Robert. "You'll sink the ship, old
chap. That comes of nine pockets."
And Cyril had to do so.
Then they set off to walk to the village. It was more than a mile, and
the road was very dusty indeed, and the sun seemed to get hotter and
hotter, and the gold in their pockets got heavier and heavier.
It was Jane who said, "I don't see how we're to spend it all. There must
be thousands of pounds among the lot of us. I'm going to leave some of
mine behind this stump in the hedge. And directly we get to the village
we'll buy some biscuits; I know it's long past dinner-time." She took
out a handful or two of gold and hid it in the hollows of an old
hornbeam. "How round and yellow they are," she said. "Don't you wish
they were made of gingerbread and we were going to eat them?"
"Well, they're not, and we're not," said Cyril. "Come on!"
But they came on heavily and wearily. Before they reached the village,
more than one stump in the hedge concealed its little hoard of hidden
treasure. Yet they reached the village with about twelve hundred guineas
in their pockets. But in spite of this inside wealth they looked
quite ordinary outside, and no one would have thought they could have
more than a half-crown each at the outside. The haze of heat, the blue
of the wood smoke, made a sort of dim misty cloud over the red roofs of
the village. The four sat down heavily on the first bench to which they
came. It happened to be outside the Blue Boar Inn.
It was decided that Cyril should go into the Blue Boar and ask for
ginger-beer, because, as Anthea said, "It was not wrong for men to go
into beer-saloons, only for children. And Cyril is nearer being a man
than us, because he is the eldest." So he went. The others sat in the
sun and waited.
"Oh, how hot it is!" said Robert. "Dogs put their tongues out when
they're hot; I wonder if it would cool us at all to put out ours?"
"We might try," Jane said; and they all put their tongues out as far as
ever they could go, so that it quite stretched their throats, but it
only seemed to make them thirstier than ever, besides annoying everyone
who went by. So they took their tongues in again, just as Cyril came
back with ginger-beer.
"I had to pay for it out of my own money, though, that I was going to
buy rabbits with," he said. "They wouldn't change the gold. And when I
pulled out a handful the man just laughed and said it was card-counters.
And I got some sponge-cakes too, out of a glass jar on the bar-counter.
And some biscuits with caraways in."
The sponge-cakes were both soft and dry and the biscuits were dry too,
and yet soft, which biscuits ought not to be. But the ginger-beer made
up for everything.
"It's my turn now to try to buy something with the money," Anthea said;
"I'm next eldest. Where is the pony-cart kept?"
It was at The Chequers, and Anthea went in the back way to the yard,
because they all knew that little girls ought not to go into the bars of
beer-saloons. She came out, as she herself said, "pleased but not
proud."
"He'll be ready in a brace of shakes, he says," she remarked, "and he's
to have one sovereign--or whatever it is--to drive us into Rochester and
back, besides waiting there till we've got everything we want. I think I
managed very well."
"You think yourself jolly clever, I daresay," said Cyril moodily. "How
did you do it?"
"I wasn't jolly clever enough to go taking handfuls of money out of my
pocket, to make it seem cheap, anyway," she retorted. "I just found a
young man doing something to a horse's legs with a sponge and a pail.
And I held out one sovereign, and I said--'Do you know what this is?' He
said 'No,' and he'd call his father. And the old man came, and he said
it was a spade guinea; and he said was it my own to do as I liked with,
and I said 'Yes'; and I asked about the pony-cart, and I said he could
have the guinea if he'd drive us into Rochester. And his name is S.
Crispin. And he said, 'Right oh.'"
It was a new sensation to be driven in a smart pony-trap along pretty
country roads; it was very pleasant too (which is not always the case
with new sensations), quite apart from the beautiful plans of spending
the money which each child made as they went along, silently of course
and quite to itself, for they felt it would never have done to let the
old innkeeper hear them talk in the affluent sort of way in which they
were thinking. The old man put them down by the bridge at their request.
"If you were going to buy a carriage and horses, where would you go?"
asked Cyril, as if he were only asking for the sake of something to say.
"Billy Peasemarsh, at the Saracen's Head," said the old man promptly.
"Though all forbid I should recommend any man where it's a question of
horses, no more than I'd take anybody else's recommending if I was
a-buying one. But if your pa's thinking of a rig of any sort, there
ain't a straighter man in Rochester, nor civiller spoken, than Billy,
though I says it."
"Thank you," said Cyril. "The Saracen's Head."
And now the children began to see one of the laws of nature turn upside
down and stand on its head like an acrobat. Any grown-up person would
tell you that money is hard to get and easy to spend. But the fairy
money had been easy to get, and spending it was not only hard, it was
almost impossible. The trades-people of Rochester seemed to shrink, to a
trades-person, from the glittering fairy gold ("furrin money" they
called it, for the most part).
To begin with, Anthea, who had had the misfortune to sit on her hat
earlier in the day, wished to buy another. She chose a very beautiful
one, trimmed with pink roses and the blue breasts of peacocks. It was
marked in the window, "Paris Model, three guineas."
"I'm glad," she said, "because it says guineas, and not sovereigns,
which we haven't got."
But when she took three of the spade guineas in her hand, which was by
this time rather dirty owing to her not having put on gloves before
going to the gravel-pit, the black-silk young lady in the shop looked
very hard at her, and went and whispered something to an older and
uglier lady, also in black silk, and then they gave her back the money
and said it was not current coin.
"It's good money," said Anthea, "and it's my own."
"I daresay," said the lady, "but it's not the kind of money that's
fashionable now, and we don't care about taking it."
"I believe they think we've stolen it," said Anthea, rejoining the
others in the street; "if we had gloves they wouldn't think we were so
dishonest. It's my hands being so dirty fills their minds with doubts."
So they chose a humble shop, and the girls bought cotton gloves, the
kind at a shilling, but when they offered a guinea the woman looked at
it through her spectacles and said she had no change; so the gloves had
to be paid for out of Cyril's money with which he meant to buy rabbits