The E. Nesbit MEGAPACK ®: 26 Classic Novels and Stories. E. Nesbit
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too bad,” said Philip. “I do think.” Then he stopped short and just looked cross.
“The Princess and the Champion will now have their teas,” said Mr. Noah. “Right about face, everybody, please, and quick march.”
Philip and Lucy found themselves marching side by side through the night made yellow with continuous fireworks.
You must picture them marching across a great plain of grass where many coloured flowers grew. You see a good many of Philip’s buildings had been made on the drawing-room carpet at home, which was green with pink and blue and yellow and white flowers. And this carpet had turned into grass and growing flowers, following that strange law which caused things to change into other things, like themselves, but larger and really belonging to a living world.
No one spoke. Philip said nothing because he was in a bad temper. And if you are in a bad temper, nothing is a good thing to say. To circumvent a dragon and then kill it, and to have such an adventure end in tea with Lucy, was too much. And he had other reasons for silence too. And Lucy was silent because she had so much to say that she didn’t know where to begin; and besides, she could feel how cross Philip was. The crowd did not talk because it was not etiquette to talk when taking part in processions. Mr. Noah did not talk because it made him out of breath to walk and talk at the same time, two things neither of which he had been designed to do.
So that it was quite a silent party which at last passed through the gateway of the town and up its streets.
Philip wondered where the tea would be—not in the prison of course. It was very late for tea, too, quite the middle of the night it seemed. But all the streets were brilliantly lighted, and flags and festoons of flowers hung from all the windows and across all the streets.
It was in the front of a big building in one of the great squares of the city that an extra display of coloured lamps disclosed open doors and red-carpeted steps. Mr. Noah hurried up them, and turned to receive Philip and Lucy.
“The City of Polistopolis,” he said, “whose unworthy representative I am, greets in my person the most noble Sir Philip, Knight and Slayer of the Dragon. Also the Princess whom he has rescued. Be pleased to enter.”
They went up the red-cloth covered steps and into a hall, very splendid with silver and ivory. Mr. Noah stooped to a confidential question.
“You’d like a wash, perhaps?” he said, “and your Princess too. And perhaps you’d like to dress up a little? Before the banquet, you know.”
“Banquet?” said Philip. “I thought it was tea.”
“Business before pleasure,” said Mr. Noah; “first the banquet, then the tea. This way to the dressing-rooms.”
There were two doors side by side. On one door was painted “Knight’s dressing-room,” on the other “Princess’s dressing-room.”
“Look out,” said Mr. Noah; “the paint is wet. You see there wasn’t much time.”
Philip found his dressing-room very interesting. The walls were entirely of looking-glass, and on tables in the middle of the room lay all sorts of clothes of beautiful colours and odd shapes. Shoes, stockings, hats, crowns, armour, swords, cloaks, breeches, waistcoats, jerkins, trunk hose. An open door showed a marble bath-room. The bath was sunk in the floor as the baths of luxurious Roman Empresses used to be, and as nowadays baths sometimes are, in model dwellings. (Only I am told that some people keep their coals in the baths—which is quite useless because coals are always black however much you wash them.)
Philip undressed and went into the warm clear water, greenish between the air and the marble. Why is it so pleasant to have a bath, and so tiresome to wash your hands and face in a basin? He put on his shirt and knickerbockers again, and wandered round the room looking at the clothes laid out there, and wondering which of the wonderful costumes would be really suitable for a knight to wear at a banquet. After considerable hesitation he decided on a little soft shirt of chain-mail that made just a double handful of tiny steel links as he held it. But a difficulty arose.
“I don’t know how to put it on,” said Philip; “and I expect the banquet is waiting. How cross it’ll be.”
He stood undecided, holding the chain mail in his hands, when his eyes fell on a bell handle. Above it was an ivory plate, and on it in black letters the word Valet. Philip rang the bell.
Instantly a soft tap at the door heralded the entrance of a person whom Philip at the first glance supposed to be a sandwich man. But the second glance showed that the oblong flat things which he wore were not sandwich-boards, but dominoes. The person between them bowed low.
“Oh!” said Philip, “I rang for the valet.”
“I am not the valet,” said the domino-enclosed person, who seemed to be in skintight black clothes under his dominoes, “I am the Master of the Robes. I only attend on really distinguished persons. Double-six, at your service, Sir. Have you chosen your dress?”
“I’d like to wear the armour,” said Philip, holding it out. “It seems the right thing for a Knight,” he added.
“Quite so, sir. I confirm your opinion.”
He proceeded to dress Philip in a white tunic and to fasten the coat of mail over this. “I’ve had a great deal of experience,” he said; “you couldn’t have chosen better. You see, I’m master of the subject of dress. I am able to give my whole mind to it; my own dress being fixed by law and not subject to changes of fashion leaves me free to think for others. And I think deeply. But I see that you can think for yourself.”
You have no idea how jolly Philip looked in the mail coat and mailed hood—just like a Crusader.
At the doorway of the dressing-room he met Lucy in a short white dress and a coronal of pearls round her head. “I always wanted to be a fairy,” she said.
“Did you have any one to dress you?” he asked.
“Oh no!” said Lucy calmly. “I always dress myself.”
“Ladies have the advantage there,” said Double-six, bowing and walking backwards. “The banquet is spread.”
It turned out to be spread on three tables, one along each side of a great room, and one across the top of the room, on a dais—such a table as that high one at which dons and distinguished strangers sit in the Halls of colleges.
Mr. Noah was already in his place in the middle of the high table, and Lucy and Philip now took their places at each side of him. The table was spread with all sorts of nice-looking foods and plates of a pink-and-white pattern very familiar to Philip. They were, in fact, as he soon realised, the painted wooden plates from his sister’s old dolls’ house. There was no food just in front of the children, only a great empty bowl of silver.
Philip fingered his knife and fork; the pattern of those also was familiar to him. They were indeed the little leaden ones out of the dolls’ house knife-basket of green and silver filigree. He hungrily waited. Servants in straight yellow dresses and red masks and caps were beginning to handle the dishes. A dish was handed to him. A beautiful jelly it looked like. He took up his spoon and was just about to help himself, when Mr. Noah whispered ardently, “Don’t!” and as Philip looked at him in astonishment he added, still in a whisper, “Pretend, can’t you? Have you never had a pretending banquet?” But before he had caught the whisper, Philip had tried to press the edge of the leaden spoon into the shape of jelly. And he felt that the jelly was quite hard. He went through the form of helping himself, but it was just nothing that he put on his plate. And he saw that Mr. Noah and Lucy and all the other guests did the same. Presently another dish was handed to him. There was no changing of plates. “They needn’t,” Philip thought bitterly. This time it was a fat goose, not carved, and now Philip saw that it was attached to its dish with glue. Then he understood.
(You know the beautiful but uneatable feasts which are given you in a white cardboard box with blue binding and fine shavings to pack the dishes and keep them from breaking? I myself, when I was little,