Part 1

[Illustration: THE FLYING CARPET]

[Illustration]

THE FLYING CARPET

Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York

COPYRIGHT, 1925, BY CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS

Printed in the United States of America

[Illustration: [Colophon]]

LIST OF THOSE WHO HAVE WOVEN THIS FLYING CARPET

[Illustration]

PAGE _THOMAS HARDY_ _A POPULAR PERSONAGE AT HOME_ 9

_ADELAIDE PHILLPOTTS_ _THOMAS HENRY TITT_ 11 _THEOPHANIA_ 160

_JOHN LEA_ _THE TWO SAILORS_ 108 _THE SIMPLE WAY_ 198

_ALFRED NOYES_ _INVITATION TO THE VOYAGE_ 16

_DESMOND MACCARTHY_ _I WISH I WERE A DOG_ 18

_A. A. MILNE_ _WHEN WE WERE VERY, VERY YOUNG_ 32

_DAVID CECIL_ _THE SHADOW LAND_ 35

_CYNTHIA ASQUITH_ _THE BARGAIN SHOP_ 38 _OLAF THE FAIR AND OLAF THE DARK_ 184

_HENRY NEWBOLT_ _THE JOYOUS BALLAD OF THE PARSON AND THE BADGER_ 54 _VICE-VERSA: ANY FATHER TO ANY DAUGHTER_ 118 _SERMON TIME_ 183 _FINIS_ 200

_A. PEMBURY_ _THE SPARK_ 158 _THE RHYME OF CAPTAIN GALE_ 182

_G. K. CHESTERTON_ _TO ENID_ 57

_CHARLES WHIBLEY_ _SCENES IN THE LIFE OF A PRINCESS_ 60

_J. M. BARRIE_ _NEIL AND TINTINNABULUM_ 65

_HERBERT ASQUITH_ _STORIES_ 15 _THE DREAM_ 96 _EGGS_ 107

_ELIZABETH LOWNDES_ _MR. SNOOGLES_ 99

_HUGH LOFTING_ _DR. DOLITTLE MEETS A LONDONER IN PARIS_ 110

_MARGARET KENNEDY_ _KITTEEN_ 120

_CLEMENCE DANE_ _GILBERT_ 122

_HILAIRE BELLOC_ _JACK AND HIS PONY, TOM_ 129 _TOM AND HIS PONY, JACK_ 131

_WALTER DE LA MARE_ _PIGTAILS, LTD._ 133

_SIR WALTER RALEIGH_ _THE PERFECT HOST_ 157

_EDWARD MARSH_ _THE WEASEL IN THE STOREROOM_ 167

_W. H. DAVIES_ _LOVE THE JEALOUS_ 168

_DENIS MACKAIL_ _THE MAGIC MEDICINE_ 170

List of those who have helped to adorn the Flying Carpet

[Illustration]

_MABEL LUCIE ATTWELL_ _J. R. C. BODLEY_ _L. R. BRIGHTWELL_ _H. M. BROCK_ _HAROLD EARNSHAW_ _DAPHNE JERROLD_ _E. BARNARD LINTOTT_ _HUGH LOFTING_ _GEORGE MORROW_ _SUSAN PEARSE_ _T. HEATH ROBINSON_ _ERNEST H. SHEPARD_ _DUDLEY TENNANT_ _A. H. WATSON_

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A POPULAR PERSONAGE AT HOME

BY THOMAS HARDY

“I live here: ‘Wessex’ is my name, I am a dog known rather well: I guard the house; but how that came To be my lot I cannot tell.

“With a leap and a heart elate I go, At the end of an hour’s expectancy, To take a walk of a mile or so, With the folk who share the house with me.

“Along the path amid the grass I sniff, and find out rarest smells For rolling over as I pass The open fields towards the dells.

“No doubt I shall always cross this sill, And turn the corner, and stand steady, Gazing back for my mistress till She reaches where I have run already.

“And that this meadow with its brook, And bulrush, just as it appears As I plunge past with hasty look, Will stay the same a thousand years.”

Thus “Wessex.” Yet a dubious ray At times informs his steadfast eye, Just for a trice, as though to say: “Will these things, after all, go by?”

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Thomas Henry Titt

[Illustration]

ADELAIDE PHILLPOTTS

In the South West of London stands a cathedral, which, from outside, looks like a child’s castle of bricks. But when you go inside you see nothing at first but a large emptiness—a ceiling somewhere up in the clouds supported by huge marble columns. There is always a smell of incense in the air, and there is a little painted figure before which, night and day, burn three rows of candles. Sometimes, on Saints’ Days, other rows of candles are lighted before other painted figures—St. Andrew, St. Patrick, St. George—making centres of bright light in the dimness of the great interior.

Near this cathedral are blocks of tenement buildings where families dwell, one on top of the other, like books in a bookcase. These buildings are full of children: boys and girls and babies.

On the top floor of one of these blocks lived Thomas Henry Titt, aged twelve. Thomas Henry’s father kept a shop round the corner where you saw sausages and onions frying in the window. His mother was dead. He had an elder sister who mended his clothes and helped their father in the shop. Thomas was known as Tom-Tit; and he looked rather like a bird, for he had thin arms and legs, sharp little eyes, a crest of bright hair, and a pointed nose.

Like every imaginative child, Tom-Tit had a secret: a passion for the sea, which he had never seen. His ocean was in his mind’s eye, and he hoped as no one ever hoped before that one day he might behold the reality of his dream. In the darkness of night Tom-Tit, alone in his attic, lying awake on his mattress, gazed out upon a heaving cornflower-blue coloured ocean—as blue as the flowers which the woman sold at the end of his street. And this ocean was full of shining fishes. There was no land in sight—ever.

Thomas Henry Titt loved the candles that burned before the painted figure in the cathedral. In the winter, when he was small, he had often held his little frozen hands to the warmth of them, when nobody was looking. But as he grew older the candles began to have for him a deeper significance. During evening service he would creep into a corner by one of the pillars, listening to the organ and watching the kneeling people in the distance near the shining altar. Then, when the music stopped and the people were gone, he would steal out and patter along to the rows of candles. There his heart would light up, even as they, and he would thrill with a strange, unaccountable happiness.

Gradually Tom-Tit began to connect these candles with his desire for the sea. The two facts became one in his mind. It was as if, by the light of the former, he could see the blue waves of the other.

Underneath the rows of burning candles was a rack full of new ones. Tom often saw people drop a coin into a box, take one, fix it upon a spike among the rest, and light it. And a longing overcame him to possess for his own one of these new candles. Perhaps, at the bottom of his mind, was the idea that if he took it home and lighted it, it would bring him nearer to his ultimate ambition—to see the sea. He determined to realise his desire.

Then came a winter day when Tom-Tit’s head ached, shivers ran up and down his spine, and he felt very ill. Therefore his sister bade him stay in bed, and he did so until she had left the house with her father. But then, despite his fever, the craving to possess that candle overcame obedience. So, gripping a penny, he rose, staggered downstairs, and out into the road. The cold air cooled his body and numbed his pains. He slipped unnoticed into the cathedral and leaned for a moment against the wall, for his head was swimming and he could not see. Then he recovered, and his eyes sparkled as he beheld the candles flickering like golden flowers before the wooden figure at the end of the aisle. The surrounding air was a golden haze. The smell of incense was sweet.

He tottered to the box of new candles, dropped in his penny, and took one. Then he dragged himself home, feeling worse and worse at every step, but gloriously glad within, because of the candle in his pocket.

All day he lay on his bed, too ill to sit up, nursing his treasure. “I shall be well to-night,” he thought, “and when it’s dark I’ll light it.”

In the evening his father and sister returned, found him in a state of high fever, and sent for the doctor. He, when he saw Tom-Tit, said that he would come back in the morning and remove him to the hospital if he were not better.

He gave Tom a sleeping draught before he left.

When his father and sister had gone to bed, Thomas Henry, feeling drowsy and less hurt with pain, pulled out his candle half melted already by the heat of his hands, lit it, and set it on a chair by his side. Then he lay gazing at it, until the whole world was but a golden flame with a blue root.

Then a wonderful thing happened. He did not see the candle any more. His first idea was that the wind must have blown it out, for a great wind was blowing. Where could he be? He opened his eyes, which must have been closed, and lo! he was in a little wooden boat on a cornflower-blue sea! The boat was rocking from side to side like the baby’s cradle on the floor below—a mechanical rock, rock, rock, rock, from side to side. He scooped up a handful of the sea, and, just as he had expected, it was bright blue. He could see blue shining fishes swimming round the boat, so he caught them in his fingers where they wriggled about and made blue reflections until he threw them back again into the blue water.

And all the time, though he could not see it, the candle was burning at his side—burning lower, and lower, and lower.

From horizon to horizon the cobalt ocean stretched around him—not a speck of land anywhere. He was perfectly happy there staring down through the blue fathoms and feeling the wind blow. He had never been so happy in his life before.

Then the candle went out.

In the morning they found a little pool of grease on the chair—and Tom-Tit was dead.

But this is not really a sad story, because Thomas Henry did what many thousands of people never do, even though they live to be a hundred and three—he realised his ambition. He saw the sea. And he was not disillusioned; for the sea that he saw was just as beautiful as the sea which he imagined: the reality matched the dream.

Stories

HERBERT ASQUITH

When lights are out and Pat’s in bed, He tells a story from his head Of men who fight by sea and land With cutlasses in either hand. Who make their mouths into a sheath And sharpen dirks upon their teeth; And schooners heeling to the breeze That blows across the coral seas, With kegs of rum and bars of gold And corpses rolling in the hold. Then far below the dining-room Pours out its voices: through the gloom Borne on tobacco-laden air The roar of talk comes up the stair, But where are now the coral seas And where is Pat? Lost on the breeze With streaming flag the schooner fades And takes her captain to the shades.

Invitation to the Voyage

(_A New Version_)

ALFRED NOYES

A rambling cherry-petalled stream; A bridge of pale bamboo; A path that seemed a twisted dream Where everything came true; A crimson-lanterned garden-house With jutting eaves below the boughs; The slant-eyed elves in blue With soft slip-slapping heels and toes Dancing before the Daimyōs:

“_And is it Old Japan_,” you cry “That half-remembered place”— I see beneath an English sky A child with brooding face. The curious realm he chose to build And paint with any hues he willed Is all I strive to trace, Where odds and ends of memory smile Like bits of heaven, through clouds awhile.

And some for charts and maps would call, But here, beside the fire, The kakemono on the wall Is all that we require. A chanty piped by bosun Lear May float around us while we steer Our hearts to their desire— The Nonsense Land beyond the sun Where West and East, at last, are one.

Then let the rigging hum the tales That Tusitala[1] told When first we spread our purple sails In quest of pirate gold; For, though he waved us all good-bye Beneath the deep Samoan sky, His heart was blithe and bold, And hailed across a darker main The shadowy hills of home again.

So we, who now adventure far Beyond the singing foam, May see, in every dipping star, The harbour lights of home; And, finding still, as all have found, That every ship is homeward bound, (For none could ever roam A sea too wide for heaven to span) Sail on—sail on—to Old Japan.

Footnote 1:

Robert Louis Stevenson.

I Wish I Were a Dog

DESMOND MACCARTHY

There were five in the family and Dicky, nearly nine, was the youngest but one. Dicky’s father was a country doctor, and, like many country doctors, he led rather a hard life. The sick people he visited lived miles apart, and many were too poor to pay him properly.

Dr. Brook was a tall, pale man with grizzled hair turning to grey. He was clever, and he had a quick, short way of talking. He seemed to make up his mind about everything in a moment, and if you asked him a question, he answered as though it ought not to have been necessary to explain.

Dicky would have been surprised to hear that his father was a kind man, but kind he was. He hated attending upon well-to-do people who had nothing much the matter with them, though he knew he must visit them to make enough money to bring up his own children properly.

He would remember this while he was driving miles out of his way to see some poor cottager, and so, when he arrived at the cottage, he was usually in a bad temper. On the other hand, when he was calling on old Mrs. Varden at The Grange, who was sound as a bell and would probably live to be ninety, he was always thinking of those who really wanted looking after. Then, instead of smiling sympathetically, while she told him how queer she had felt in the middle of the night three weeks ago, or how well her nephews were doing, he would stand in front of the fire in her cosy sitting-room, look up at the ceiling with a stern expression, and rattle the keys in his pocket in a manner which said plainly, “How much longer shall I have to listen to this stuff?” So, although everybody thought Dr. Brook “a very clever doctor,” few people were fond of him.

All day he went bumping and rushing along the country lanes and roads in his shabby, muddy car, which he never had time to clean properly; and when he got home his day’s work was not over. In the evening he turned schoolmaster and taught his children.

Dicky’s mother had died when his brother Peregrin was born. Ella, the eldest of the children, a grown-up girl, kept house and taught Dicky and Peregrin in the morning. She was very like her father in many ways, only her cleverness had turned to music. She played the violin beautifully, and she was dying to get away from home and become a famous musician. Dr. Brook knew this and was very sorry for her; but he could not let her go till Dicky and Peregrin went to school. She had to be a governess till then. The other two boys had done very well. They had both got scholarships, and little Peregrin was as sharp as a needle.

Altogether the doctor had to admit he was very blessed in his children. But there was Dicky! Dicky was a dunce, there was no doubt about it—at least, so Ella reported. And when Dicky showed his smudgy exercise-books to his father in the evenings, his father thought it only too true.

Dicky dreaded the evening every day. He did not much mind his sister Ella’s crossness. He was used to it. But there was something awful about the weary quiet way his father used to ask, “Do you understand _now_?” Dicky had then to say “Yes,” and presently his father would find out he hadn’t understood at all. There would be a still longer pause, and at last his father would sigh, “Unhappy boy, what will become of you!”

This was far worse than being slapped by Ella, though her ring sometimes really did hurt. His father would then repeat what he had said before, twice, very slowly, as though he were dropping the words drop by drop into a medicine glass, looking at Dicky all the time, till Dicky’s lips began to quiver and his eyes to fill, when his father would say hastily, pulling out his watch, “There, there. It’s time for bed. Run along. Kiss me.” Then Dicky’s one desire was to get out of the room before bursting into tears. He did not mind if it happened outside the door or upstairs. Indeed, it was rather a comfort to cry, especially if he could only get hold of Jasper, the black spaniel, to hug and talk to while he was crying. But he was terrified at breaking down before his father. He somehow felt if he did, he might never stop sobbing, or that something else dreadful would happen. One evening it did happen.

The day had been altogether a bad day. Dicky had got up that morning feeling as if his head was rather smaller and lighter than usual. It felt about the size of an apple. Ella had had a fat letter that morning from her bosom friend, at the Royal College of Music in London. Lessons were always worse on the days she heard from her, and that morning it was true also, for once in a way, that Dicky had really _not_ been “trying.” He had begun by making thirty-four mistakes in his French dictation—and he was rather glad. During arithmetic he had amused himself by imagining that the numbers had different characters, and that some of them were very pleased to find themselves side by side in the sums. The result was that all his sums were wrong, and he had exasperated Ella by telling her that it was the fault of number 8, who was a quarrelsome widow and wore spectacles.

When left alone to do his Latin Prose, while Ella went to her bedroom to practise furiously on the fiddle, he had spent the time in teasing a beetle by hemming it in between canals of ink on the schoolroom table. He liked the beetle, but he enjoyed imagining its disgust and perplexity, and he enjoyed feeling that he could, but wouldn’t, drown it. When Ella came back and found that he had only written one Latin word, “Jam” (already), on the paper, she tore the exercise book from him and said that he could do what he liked: she would tell his father and never teach him again—never, never, never.

[Illustration: “SHE WOULD NEVER TEACH HIM AGAIN—NEVER, NEVER”]

But the evening was a long way off, and Dicky walked into the garden, in a gloomy sort of way rather proud of himself. He found, however, he could not amuse himself, so he devoted himself to amusing Jasper, chasing him in circles about the lawn and throwing sticks for him to fetch. When the dog had had enough, and lay down on the grass with his paws out in front of him like a lion, Dicky did not know what to do next. He went down himself on all fours and kissed Jasper, who responded, between quick pants, with a hasty slobber of his pink quivering tongue, as though he were snapping at a fly. Ah, if only he were as happy as Jasper! Dicky suddenly remembered that an old gentleman had once given him a sort of blessing, saying, “May you be as happy as a good dog.” What an easy time Jasper had! Of course he got into trouble if he rolled in things, but if Dicky were in his shoes—or perhaps he ought to say on his paws—_he_ wouldn’t want to. (Jasper certainly had a very odd taste in scent.) Examinations, scholarships—those awful things meant nothing to him. Dicky thought he could have easily managed to be a good dog. And since he wanted to stop thinking about himself, he began to play a favourite game of imagining what Jasper said to other dogs about his home and the family. How he would boast to them of the excellent rabbit-hunting in the copse near by, of the good bones he had and the warm fires; and how he would tell them about jumping on Dick’s bed in the morning and how perfectly Dick and he understood each other. But the worst of it was that unless one were tired and a little sleepy, one could not go on with that game very long. It soon began to seem silly. It was not a good morning game.

Ella was very grim at lunch and only spoke to Peregrin. After luncheon Dicky felt very inclined to work—anything to stop thinking. He said something about learning grammar, but Ella took all the books away and locked them up. She said he could do _whatever he liked_. This had never happened before and it frightened him.

He went for a walk by himself. The sky was grey and the hedges were dripping and his feet felt heavy. He actually tried to remember what cases the different prepositions governed in Latin, as he walked along, in the hope of surprising his father in the evening; but the fear that he might be repeating them to himself all wrong made him hopeless. It was never safe to learn without the book. Only once, when a red stoat ambled with arched back across the lane, did he forget himself. A stoat, too, must have a jolly life, he thought, even if it ended by being nailed up on a door by a keeper. He stayed out till it was dark and past tea time.

His father’s hat and coat were not in the hall when he returned, so Dicky knew he had not yet come back. Upstairs he could hear the wailing of Ella’s violin. He went up and knocked at her door. She did not say “Come in,” or stop bowing away or frowning at the music on the stand in front of her. “If you’re hungry get milk in the kitchen,” she said, her chin still on the fiddle, “and—shut the door.”

Dicky did so, and stood for a minute outside it. Then he went slowly to the schoolroom and sat down at the table. Peregrin was already in bed, and there was nothing to do but to wait.

Time passed very slowly, and if Dicky had not known that he was dreading something, he would have thought he must be ill. He did, indeed, feel very queer. At last he heard the front door slam and the tramp of his father’s stride in the hall. The same instant the sound of the violin stopped and Ella walked rapidly along the passage; and before Dicky knew what he was doing he had started to run after her. At the head of the stairs he stopped himself, and peeping over the bannisters he saw that his father had hesitated in the middle of pulling off his coat, and was staring at Ella, who was talking vehemently in front of him. Dicky heard her raised voice saying, “It is hopeless. Father, I won’t; I really can’t. He....” His father finished getting out of his coat without a word; then they both went into the study. The door closed behind them, and Dicky crept back to the schoolroom.

Presently, he heard Ella calling him to come down. A few minutes before, his legs had carried him to the top of the stairs without his wanting it, now they refused to move. “Father wants you in the study at once,” she shouted, and she continued to call, “Dick, Dick, Dick, Dick.” There was a long pause and Ella herself stood in the doorway.

“Father is coming to whip you,” she said, and walked off to her room.