LITMIR.BIZ

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passage, which is called ‘the hall’, where the umbrella-stand is, and the picture of the ‘Monarch of the Glen’ in a yellow shining frame, with brown spots on the Monarch from the damp in the house before last, and there was cook, very red and damp in the face, and with a clean apron tied on all crooked over the dirty one that she had dished up those dear delightful chickens in. She stood there and she seemed to get redder and damper, and she twisted the corner of her apron round her fingers, and she said very shortly and fiercely:

      ‘If you please, ma‘am, I should wish to leave at my day month.’

      Mother leaned against the hatstand. The children could see her looking pale through the crack of the door, because she had been very kind to the cook, and had given her a holiday only the day before, and it seemed so very unkind of the cook to want to go like this, and on a Sunday too.

      ‘Why, what’s the matter?’ Mother said.

      ‘It’s them children,’ the cook replied, and somehow the children all felt that they had known it from the first. They did not remember having done anything extra wrong, but it is so frightfully easy to displease a cook. ‘It’s them children: there’s that there new carpet in their room, covered thick with mud, both sides, beastly yellow mud, and sakes alive knows where they got it. And all that muck to clean up on a Sunday! It’s not my place, and it’s not my intentions, so I don’t deceive you, ma’am, and but for them limbs, which they is if ever there was, it’s not a bad place, though I says it, and I wouldn’t wish to leave, but—’

      ‘I’m very sorry,’ said Mother, gently. ‘I will speak to the children. And you had better think it over, and if you really wish to go, tell me tomorrow.’

      Next day Mother had a quiet talk with cook, and cook said she didn’t mind if she stayed on a bit, just to see.

      But meantime the question of the muddy carpet had been gone into thoroughly by Father and Mother. Jane’s candid explanation that the mud had come from the bottom of a foreign tower where there was buried treasure was received with such chilling disbelief that the others limited their defence to an expression of sorrow, and of a determination ‘not to do it again’. But Father said (and Mother agreed with him, because mothers have to agree with fathers, and not because it was her own idea) that children who coated a carpet on both sides with thick mud, and when they were asked for an explanation could only talk silly nonsense – that meant Jane’s truthful statement – were not fit to have a carpet at all, and, indeed, shouldn’t have one for a week!

      So the carpet was brushed (with tea-leaves, too, which was the only comfort Anthea could think of) and folded up and put away in the cupboard at the top of the stairs, and daddy put the key in his trousers pocket.

      ‘Till Saturday,’ said he.

      ‘Never mind,’ said Anthea, ‘we’ve got the. Phoenix.’

      But, as it happened, they hadn’t. The Phoenix was nowhere to be found, and everything had suddenly settled down from the rosy wild beauty of magic happenings to the common damp brownness of ordinary November life in Camden Town – and there was the nursery floor all bare boards in the middle and brown oilcloth round the outside, and the bareness and yellowness of the middle floor showed up the black-beetles with terrible distinctness, when the poor things came out in the evening, as usual, to try to make friends with the children. But the children never would.

      The Sunday ended in gloom, which even junket for supper in the blue Dresden bowl could hardly lighten at all. Next day the Lamb’s cough was worse. It certainly seemed very whoopy, and the doctor came in his brougham carriage.

      Everyone tried to bear up under the weight of the sorrow which it was to know that the wishing carpet was locked up and the Phoenix mislaid. A good deal of time was spent in looking for the Phoenix.

      ‘It’s a bird of its word,’ said Anthea. ‘I’m sure it’s not deserted us. But you know it had a most awfully long fly from wherever it was to near Rochester and back, and I expect the poor thing’s feeling tired out and wants rest. I am sure we may trust it.’

      The others tried to feel sure of this, too, but it was hard.

      No one could be expected to feel very kindly towards the cook, since it was entirely through her making such a fuss about a little foreign mud that the carpet had been taken away.

      ‘She might have told us,’ said Jane, ‘and Panther and I would have cleaned it with tea-leaves.’

      ‘She’s a cantankerous cat,’ said Robert.

      ‘I shan’t say what I think about her,’ said Anthea, primly, ‘because it would be evil speaking, lying, and slandering.’

      ‘It’s not lying to say she’s a disagreeable pig, and a beastly blue-nosed Bozwoz,’ said Cyril, who had read The Eyes of Light, and intended to talk like Tony as soon as he could teach Robert to talk like Paul.

      And all the children, even Anthea, agreed that even if she wasn’t a blue-nosed Bozwoz, they wished cook had never been born.

      But I ask you to believe that they didn’t do all the things on purpose which so annoyed the cook during the following week, though I daresay the things would not have happened if the cook had been a favourite.

      This is a mystery. Explain it if you can.

      The things that had happened were as follows:

      Sunday. – Discovery of foreign mud on both sides of the carpet.

      Monday. – Licorice put on to boil with aniseed balls in a saucepan. Anthea did this, because she thought it would be good for the Lamb’s cough. The whole thing forgotten, and bottom of saucepan burned out. It was the little saucepan lined with white that was kept for the baby’s milk.

      Tuesday. – A dead mouse found in pantry. Fish-slice taken to dig grave with. By regrettable accident fish-slice broken. Defence: ‘The cook oughtn’ to keep dead mice in pantries.’

      Wednesday. – Chopped suet left on kitchen table. Robert added chopped soap, but he says he thought the suet was soap too.

      Thursday. – Broke the kitchen window by falling against it during a perfectly fair game of bandits in the area.

      Friday. – Stopped up grating of kitchen sink with putty and filled sink with water to make a lake to sail paper boats in. Went away and left the tap running. Kitchen hearthrug and cook’s shoes ruined.

      On Saturday the carpet was restored. There had been plenty of time during the week to decide where it should be asked to go when they did get it back.

      Mother had gone over to granny’s, and had not taken the Lamb because he had a bad cough, which, cook repeatedly said, was whooping-cough as sure as eggs is eggs.

      ‘But we’ll take him out, a ducky darling,’ said Anthea. ‘We’ll take him somewhere where you can’t have whooping-cough. Don’t be so silly, Robert. If he does talk about it no one’ll take any notice. He’s always talking about things he’s never seen.’

      So they dressed the Lamb and themselves in out-of-doors clothes, and the Lamb chuckled and coughed, and laughed and coughed again, poor dear, and all the chairs and tables were moved off the carpet by the boys, while Jane nursed the Lamb, and Anthea rushed through the house in one last wild hunt for the missing Phoenix.

      ‘It’s no use waiting for it,’ she said, reappearing breathless in the breakfast-room. ‘But I know it hasn’t deserted us. It’s a bird of its word.’

      ‘Quite so,’ said the gentle voice of the Phoenix from beneath the table.

      Everyone fell on its knees and looked up, and there was the Phoenix perched on a crossbar of wood that ran across under the table, and had once supported a drawer, in the happy days before the drawer had been used as a boat, and its bottom unfortunately trodden out by Raggett’s Really Reliable School Boots on the feet of Robert.

      ‘I’ve been here all the time,’ said the Phoenix,

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