Enchanted Castle and Five Children and It (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (60 page)

 

None of the six human beings who saw that moon-rising were ever able to think about it as having anything to do with time. Only for one instant could that moonray have rested full on the centre of that stone. And yet there was time for many happenings.

From that height one could see far out over the quiet park and sleeping gardens, and through the grey green of them shapes moved, approaching.

The great beasts came first, strange forms that were when the world was new—gigantic lizards with wings—dragons they lived as in men’s memories—mammoths, strange vast birds, they crawled up the hill and ranged themselves outside the circle. Then, not from the garden but from very far away, came the stone gods of Egypt and As-syria—bull—bodied, bird-winged, hawk-headed, cat-headed, all in stone, and all alive and alert; strange, grotesque figures from the towers of cathedrals—figures of angels with folded wings, figures of beasts with wings wide spread; sphinxes; uncouth idols from Southern palm-fringed islands; and, last of all, the beautiful marble shapes of the gods and goddesses who had held their festival on the lake-island, and bidden Lord Yalding and the children to this meeting.

Not a word was spoken. Each stone shape came gladly and quietly into the circle of light and understanding, as children, tired with a long ramble, creep quietly through the open door into the firelit welcome of home.

The children had thought to ask many questions. And it had been promised that the questions should be answered. Yet now no one spoke a word, because all had come into the circle of the real magic where all things are understood without speech.

Afterwards none of them could ever remember at all what had happened. But they never forgot that they had been somewhere where everything was easy and beautiful. And people who can remember even that much are never quite the same again. And when they came to talk of it next day they found that to each some little part of that night’s great enlightenment was left.

All the stone creatures drew closer round the stone—the light where the moonbeam struck it seemed to break away in spray such as water makes when it falls from a height. All the crowd was bathed in whiteness. A deep hush lay over the vast assembly.

Then a wave of intention swept over the mighty crowd. All the faces, bird, beast, Greek statue, Babylonian monster, human child, and human lover, turned upward, the radiant light illumined them and one word broke from all.

“The light!” they cried, and the sound of their voice was like the sound of a great wave; “the light! the light—”

And then the light was not any more, and, soft as floating thistle-down, sleep was laid on the eyes of all but the immortals.

 

The grass was chill and dewy and the clouds had veiled the moon. The lovers and the children were standing together, all clinging close, not for fear, but for love.

“I want,” said the French girl softly, “to go to the cave on the island.”

Very quietly through the gentle brooding night they went down to the boat-house, loosed the clanking chain, and dipped oars among the drowned stars and lilies. They came to the island, and found the steps.

“I brought candles,” said Gerald, “in case.”

So, lighted by Gerald’s candles, they went down into the Hall of Psyche and there glowed the light spread from her statue, and all was as the children had seen it before.

It is the Hall of Granted Wishes.

“The ring,” said Lord Yalding.

“The ring,” said his lover, “is the magic ring given long ago to a mortal, and it is what you say it is. It was given to your ancestor by a lady of my house that he might build her a garden and a house like her own palace and garden in her own land. So that this place is built partly by his love and partly by that magic. She never lived to see it; that was the price of the magic.”

It must have been English that she spoke, for otherwise how could the children have understood her? Yet the words were not like Mademoiselle’s way of speaking.

“Except from children,” her voice went on, “the ring exacts a payment. You paid for me, when I came by your wish, by this terror of madness that you have since known. Only one wish is free.”

“And that wish is—”

“The last,” she said. “Shall I wish?”

“Yes—wish,” they said, all of them.

“I wish, then,” said Lord Yalding’s lover, “that all the magic this ring has wrought may be undone, and that the ring itself may be no more and no less than a charm to bind thee and me together for evermore.”

She ceased. And as she ceased the enchanted light died away, the windows of granted wishes went out, like magic-lantern pictures. Gerald’s candle faintly lighted a rudely arched cave, and where Psyche’s statue had been was a stone with something carved on it.

Gerald held the light low.

“It is her grave,” the girl said.

 

Next day no one could remember anything at all exactly. But a good many things were changed. There was no ring but the plain gold ring that Mademoiselle found clasped in her hand when she woke in her own bed in the morning. More than half the jewels in the panelled room were gone, and those that remained had no panelling to cover them; they just lay—bare on the velvet-covered shelves. There was no passage at the back of the Temple of Flora. Quite a lot of the secret passages and hidden rooms had disappeared. And there were not nearly so many statues in the garden as everyone had supposed. And large pieces of the castle were missing and had to be replaced at great expense. From which we may conclude that Lord Yalding’s ancestor had used the ring a good deal to help him in his building.

However, the jewels that were left were quite enough to pay for everything.

The suddenness with which all the ring-magic was undone was such a shock to everyone concerned that they now almost doubt that any magic ever happened.

But it is certain that Lord Yalding married the French governess and that a plain gold ring was used in the ceremony, and this, if you come to think of it, could be no other than the magic ring, turned, by that last wish, into a charm to keep him and his wife together for ever.

Also, if all this story is nonsense and a make-up—if Gerald and Jimmy and Kathleen and Mabel have merely imposed on my trusting nature by a pack of unlikely inventions, how do you account for the paragraph which appeared in the evening papers the day after the magic of the moon-rising?
it said, and then went on to say how a gentleman, well known and much respected in financial circles, had vanished, leaving no trace.

“Mr. U. W Ugli,” the papers continued, “had remained late, working at his office as was his occasional habit. The office door was found locked, and on its being broken open the clothes of the unfortunate gentleman were found in a heap on the floor, together with an umbrella, a walking stick, a golf club, and, curiously enough, a feather brush, such as housemaids use for dusting. Of his body, however, there was no trace. The police are stated to have a clue.”

 

If they have, they have kept it to themselves. But I do not think they can have a clue, because, of course, that respected gentleman was the Ugly-Wugly who became real when, in search of a really good hotel, he got into the Hall of Granted Wishes. And if none of this story ever happened, how is it that those four children are such friends with Lord and Lady Yalding, and stay at The Towers almost every holidays?

It is all very well for all of them to pretend that the whole of this story is my own invention: facts are facts, and you can’t explain them away.

1
(p. 3)
To John Bland:
The “five children” of the novel are loosely based on Nesbit’s own. John Bland (“The Lamb”) was Nesbit’s fifth, born when the others were already in their teens. See the introduction (p. xxii) for an account of the circumstances surrounding his birth.

2
(p. 20)
if you had three wishes given you, and have despised the old man and his wife in the black-pudding story:
In this version of the fairy tale of “the three wishes,” a man who dislikes his wife’s cooking wishes for a helping of black pudding, to which she reacts by wishing the pudding on his nose. This requires the man to use the third and final wish to undo the effects of the second. See the introduction for a discussion of the significance of this fairy tale, which exists in many versions around the world.

3
(p. 84)
“What was it Sir Philip Sidney said when the soldier wouldn’t stand him a drink?”:
Like those of Shakespeare, the sonnets of soldier and statesman Philip Sidney (1554-1586) are considered among the finest of the Elizabethan age. In this passage, Cyril inverts a line attributed to Sidney: Wounded and dying on the battlefield, Sidney supposedly handed his water bottle to another wounded soldier with the words “Thy need is greater than mine.”

4
(p. 107)
he began boldly enough, with a sentence straight out of
Ralph de Courcy; or, The Boy Crusader: Ralph de Courcy is a character in A
March on London: Being a Story
of
Wat Tyler’s Insurrection
(1897), by the prolific G.A. (GeorgeAlfred) Henty (1832-1902). Known as “the boys’ own historian,” he wrote more than one hundred historical novels featuring young men who learn manly virtues in the heat of significant historical conflicts. The Boy Crusader may be a reference to his
Winning His Spurs: A Tale of the Crusades
(1882), which was republished the following year as
The Boy
Knight, Who Won
His Spurs Fighting with King Richard of England: A Tale of the Crusaders.

5
(p. 142) One gentleman ...
offered Robert, in
an
obliging whisper, ten pounds a week to appear at the Crystal Palace:
A huge iron and glass building, the Crystal Palace, designed by Sir Joseph Paxton (1801-1865), originally housed the Great Exhibition of 1851. It was subsequently moved to Sydenham Hill, overlooking London, and expanded; over the years its spectacular exhibits drew many thousands of visitors, including Nesbit and her family. It was destroyed by fire in 1936.

6
(p. 144)
“Robert and I are dressed the same. We’ll manage somehow, like Sydney Carton did”:
At the end of Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities (1859), Sydney Carton contrives an elaborate self-sacrificial plan to rescue his condemned look-alike, Charles Darnay, from a French prison by switching places with him.

7
(p. 182)
“I wish Martha to forget about the diamond ring, and mother to forget about the keeper cleaning the windows.” “It’s like ‘Brass Bottle’,” said Jane:
Nesbit is acknowledging the influence of The Brass Bottle (1900), a fantasy novel by Thomas Anstey Guthrie (1856-1934), who wrote under the pseudonym F. Anstey. In this novel, a modern architect buys an antique brass bottle and discovers that it contains a genie. The latter’s beneficence is so excessive that it backfires at every turn, and the exasperated architect ends up wishing it to “kindly obliterate all recollection of yourself and the brass bottle from the minds of every human being who has had anything to do with you or it” (see
The Brass Bottle,
London: Penguin, 1946, p. 218).

1
(p. 193)
assuming a gentle, pleading expression, resembling that of the late little Lord
Fauntleroy—who
must, by the way, be quite old now, and an awful prig:
A novel by Frances Hodgson Burnett (1849-1924),
Little Lord Fauntleroy
(1886) was immensely popular in its time. The book’s title character later came to epitomize (somewhat unfairly) a certain type of overdressed and insufferably polite young man.

2
(p. 205)
Beyond the rose garden was a yew hedge with an arch cut in it, and it was the beginning of a maze like the one in Hampton
Court: The renowned hedge maze at Hampton Court, a former royal palace in an outer borough of London, was planted for William of Orange between 1689 and 1695.

3
(p. 225)
“I was playing at Fair Rosamond first, and then I heard you talking in the maze”:
Rosamond, or Rosamund, Clifford (c.1140-c.1176) was a mistress of Henry II (1133-1189). According to one legend, she was hidden in the labyrinthine bower of a secret garden, but was tracked down and killed by Henry’s jealous wife, Eleanor of Aquitane (c.1 122-1204). In one version of the story, it is the equivalent of Ariadne’s thread that enables the Queen and her henchman to penetrate the maze.

4
(p. 240)
“Like La Belle Dame Sans Merci, and he does not want to be found in future ages alone and palely loitering in the middle of sedge and things”:
John Keats’s 1819 ballad describes an encounter between a man and an enchanted beauty who has left him, like others before him, in a forlorn state. Gerald’s reference to being found alone in the sedge recalls the last lines of the first and final stanzas: “Alone and palely loitering? / The sedge has wither’d from the lake, / And no birds sing.”

5
(p. 265)
“The melancholy Mabel will await the tryst without success, as far as this one is concerned. ‘Fish, fish, other fish—other fish I fry!’ ” he warbled to the tune of “Cherry Ripe”:
Gerald is parodying a love poem by Robert Herrick (1591-1674); its first line is “Cherry-ripe, ripe, ripe, I cry.”The rest of Gerald’s song echoes the finale: “Where my Julia’s lips do smile; / There’s the land, or cherry-isle, / Whose plantations fully show / All the year where cherries grow.”

6
(pp. 313, 315)
They met no one, except one man, who murmured, “Guy Fawkes, swelp me!” and crossed the road hurriedly:
Guy Fawkes (1570-1606) was the best-known member of a group of Catholic conspirators who attempted to blow up England’s Houses of Parliament and kill the king in 1605. The plot was uncovered, and Fawkes and the others were tried and executed. Guy Fawkes Day is celebrated annually on November 5 with fireworks and the burning of Fawkes in effigy.