LITMIR.BIZ

      There lay the carpet – or what was left of it – and on it lay an egg, exactly like the one out of which the Phoenix had been hatched.

      The Phoenix was walking round and round the egg, clucking with joy and pride.

      ‘I’ve laid it, you see,’ it said, ‘and as fine an egg as ever I laid in all my born days.’

      Everyone said yes, it was indeed a beauty.

      The things which the children had bought were now taken out of their papers and arranged on the table, and when the Phoenix had been persuaded to leave its egg for a moment and look at the materials for its last fire it was quite overcome.

      ‘Never, never have I had a finer pyre than this will be. You shall not regret it,’ it said, wiping away a golden tear. ‘Write quickly: “Go and tell the Psammead to fulfil the last wish of the Phoenix, and return instantly”.’

      But Robert wished to be polite and he wrote:

      ‘Please go and ask the Psammead to be so kind as to fulfil the Phoenix’s last wish, and come straight back, if you please.’

      The paper was pinned to the carpet, which vanished and returned in the flash of an eye.

      Then another paper was written ordering the carpet to take the egg somewhere where it wouldn’t be hatched for another 2,000 years. The Phoenix tore itself away from its cherished egg, which it watched with yearning tenderness till, the paper being pinned on, the carpet hastily rolled itself up round the egg, and both vanished for ever from the nursery of the house in Camden Town.

      ‘Oh, dear! oh, dear! oh, dear!’ said everybody.

      ‘Bear up,’ said the bird; ‘do you think I don’t suffer, being parted from my precious new-laid egg like this? Come, conquer your emotions and build my fire.’

      ‘Oh!’ cried Robert, suddenly, and wholly breaking down, ‘I can’t bear you to go!’

      The Phoenix perched on his shoulder and rubbed its beak softly against his ear.

      ‘The sorrows of youth soon appear but as dreams,’ it said. ‘Farewell, Robert of my heart. I have loved you well.’

      The fire had burnt to a red glow. One by one the spices and sweet woods were laid on it. Some smelt nice and some – the caraway seeds and the Violettes de Parme sachet among them – smelt worse than you would think possible.

      ‘Farewell, farewell, farewell, farewell!’ said the Phoenix, in a far-away voice.

      ‘Oh, goodbye,’ said everyone, and now all were in tears.

      The bright bird fluttered seven times round the room and settled in the hot heart of the fire. The sweet gums and spices and woods flared and flickered around it, but its golden feathers did not burn. It seemed to grow red-hot to the very inside heart of it – and then before the eight eyes of its friends it fell together, a heap of white ashes, and the flames of the cedar pencils and the sandal-wood box met and joined above it.

      ‘Whatever have you done with the carpet?’ asked Mother next day.

      ‘We gave it to someone who wanted it very much. The name began with a P,’ said Jane. The others instantly hushed her.

      ‘Oh, well, it wasn’t worth twopence,’ said Mother.

      ‘The person who began with P said we shouldn’t lose by it,’ Jane went on before she could be stopped.

      ‘I daresay!’ said Mother, laughing.

      But that very night a great box came, addressed to the children by all their names. Eliza never could remember the name of the carrier who brought it. It wasn’t Carter Paterson or the Parcels Delivery.

      It was instantly opened. It was a big wooden box, and it had to be opened with a hammer and the kitchen poker; the long nails came squeaking out, and boards scrunched as they were wrenched off. Inside the box was soft paper, with beautiful Chinese patterns on it – blue and green and red and violet. And under the paper – well, almost everything lovely that you can think of. Everything of reasonable size, I mean; for, of course, there were no motors or flying machines or thoroughbred chargers. But there really was almost everything else. Everything that the children had always wanted – toys and games and books, and chocolate and candied cherries and paint-boxes and photographic cameras, and all the presents they had always wanted to give to Father and Mother and the Lamb, only they had never had the money for them. At the very bottom of the box was a tiny golden feather. No one saw it but Robert, and he picked it up and hid it in the breast of his jacket, which had been so often the nesting-place of the golden bird. When he went to bed the feather was gone. It was the last he ever saw of the Phoenix.

      Pinned to the lovely fur cloak that Mother had always wanted was a paper, and it said:

      ‘In return for the carpet. With gratitude. – P.’

      You may guess how Father and Mother talked it over. They decided at last the person who had had the carpet, and whom, curiously enough, the children were quite unable to describe, must be an insane millionaire who amused himself by playing at being a rag-and-bone man. But the children knew better.

      They knew that this was the fulfilment, by the powerful Psammead, of the last wish of the Phoenix, and that this glorious and delightful boxful of treasures was really the very, very, very end of the Phoenix and the Carpet.

Chapter XIII.

       May-Blossom and Pearls

       Table of Contents

      The King came slowly on a great black horse, riding between the green trees. He himself wore white and green like the May-bushes, and so did the gracious lady who rode beside him on a white horse, whose long tail almost swept the ground and whose long mane fluttered in the breeze like a tattered banner.

      The lady had a fine face – proud and smiling – and as her brave eyes met the King’s even the children could see that for the time at least, she and the King were all the world to each other. They saw that in the brief moment when, in the whirl of the ringed dance, their eyes were turned the way by which the King came with his Queen.

      ‘I wish I didn’t know so much history,’ gasped Elfrida through the quick music. ‘It’s dreadful to know that her head—’ She broke off in obedience to an imperative twitch of Richard’s hand on hers.

      ‘Don’t!’ he said. ‘I have not to think. And I’ve heard that history’s all lies. Perhaps they’ll always be happy like they are now. The only way to enjoy the past is not to think of the future – the past’s future, I mean – and I’ve got something else to say to you presently,’ he added rather sternly.

      The ring broke up into an elaborate figure. The children found themselves fingering the coloured ribbons that hung from the Maypole that was the centre of their dance, twining, intertwining, handing on the streamers to other small, competent fingers. In and out, in and out – a most complicated dance. It was pleasant to find that one’s feet knew it, though one’s brain could not have foreseen, any more than it could have remembered, how the figures went. There were two rings round the Maypole – the inner ring, where Edred and

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