Bed-Knob and Broomstick (13 page)

   
"That was very nice," she admitted guardedly. And, glancing quickly
at her watch, she moved away and began to clear the table.

   
"It was lovely," cried Carey warmly, as she jumped up to help. "Do
play some more!"
Emelius, turning to look at her, smiled a trifle wanly. "Saepe labat equus
dtfessus? he explained, glancing at Miss Price.

   
Miss Price looked back at him, her face expressionless. "Yes, quite,"
she agreed uncertainly.

   
"Or perhaps," Emelius went on, "one might more truly say lmira
rivma oculos inebriant''?"
"Well," said Miss Price and gave a little laugh, "it's as you
like, really," and she clashed the plates together rather noisily as though
to make a distraction.

   
"I think," said Charles uncertainly, aside to Miss Price, "that
perhaps he means he's tired . . ."
Miss Price blushed warmly, immediately all concern. "Oh dear, oh dear ...
of course; how stupid of me! Charles, dear, put a chair under the mulberry tree
for Mr. Jones; he can rest there quietly. . . ." She glanced about the
room. "And we must find him something to read. Where's the Daily Telegraph?"
They could not find the Telegraph but found instead a book called Little Arthur's
History of England. "Couldn't he have this?" Charles urged. "It
would be even better. I mean, it would be all news to Mr. Jones from chapter
seven onward."
They went out through the back way for Emelius to see the kitchen. Surprised
and delighted, he admired all the right things in the right way-the electric
cooker, the plastic plate rack, and the stainless steel sink. He clothed his
wonder in odd, poetical phrases. Miss Price seemed very pleased. "I can't
afford a refrigerator-at least, not yet," she told him as he ran a loving
hand across the gleaming surface of the sink. "But this is rather jolly,
don't you think? Forty-three pounds, seven shillings and tenpence, excluding
the plumbing. But worth it in the end, wouldn't you say?"
But it was in the garden that Emelius came into his own. His knowledge of plants
astounded even Miss Price, and he told her countless uses for what had seemed
the commonest of herbs. Mr. Bisselthwaite's boy, who was delivering the milk,
broke off his whistling to stare at Emelius. Emelius, his long velvet robe sweeping
the lawn, returned the milkboy's stare with somber dignity. The whistling was
resumed, and the milkboy clanged down the two pints with his usual roughness.

   
Later, leaving Emelius with a history book in the shade of the mulberry tree,
reading with much interest of what was to come to pass in his future, Charles
and Carey sought out Miss Price in her bedroom.

   
"Miss Price," whispered Carey, as if Emelius might hear, "do
you like him?"
Miss Price, who was making up the bed, paused, sheet in hand. "He has distinction,"
she admitted guardedly.

   
"Think, Miss Price," went on Carey, "of the things you'd have
to talk about. You haven't even begun-"
Miss Price wrinkled her forehead. "Ye-s," she said uncertainly.

   
"Couldn't he stay a bit longer? Couldn't he stay a week?"
Miss Price turned. She sat down suddenly on the edge of the bed. "I had
better be perfectly frank," she announced firmly. "He could only stay
on one condition."
"What condition?" they asked excitedly.

   
The tip of Miss Price's nose became rather pink.

   
"He must be persuaded to have a good hot bath," she said. "And
he must have a haircut."
"Oh, I'm sure he'd do it. Willingly," said Carey.

   
"And his clothes must go to the cleaners."
"But what will he wear meantime?"
Miss Price looked thoughtful. "There's that old Norfolk suit of my father's,
and . . . yes, I've some things in a trunk . . ."
Carey and Miss Price were not present when Charles tackled Emelius under the
mulberry tree, but in the still summer air the sound of their voices floated
in through the open window. Charles's voice was a burbling monotone, but Emelius's
was raised. Charles's suggestions were meeting with opposition. The conversation
went on and on. There were a few deep silences. Carey shut her eyes and crossed
her thumbs; the going, she realized, was not easy. At last, through the mist
of leaves, she saw Emelius stand up. As the two figures began to approach the
house, Carey drew back into the room, but not before she heard Emelius's parting
shot, delivered in a voice that broke. "So be it," he said, "if
it is the custom, but I had an uncle died of the ague through this same cause."
Preparing Emelius's bath was something of a ceremony. Miss Price dug out her
fluffiest and softest bath towel and a clean cotton kimono with an embroidered
spray of flowers across the back. Carey ran the water to a pleasant, even temperature
and threw in a handful of Miss Price's carefully hoarded bath salts. She spread
out the bath mat and closed the window. Emelius was ushered in, the plumbing
was explained to him by Charles, and he was asked to put his clothes outside
the door.

   
He was a long time in the bath. The children tiptoed around the house in a state
of nervous anxiety, as if a major operation was taking place upstairs. After
a while, they heard him running the hot and cold taps and raising his voice,
against the sound of the water, in a little Shake-sperian ditty, slightly off
key.

   
"He's enjoying it," said Charles.

   
Emelius bathed, his soft mouse-colored hair falling carelessly across his brow,
looked almost ten years younger. And there was an old-fashioned distinction
about the Norfolk suit. It fitted him quite well; Miss Price's father, Carey
realized, must have been as thin and angular as Miss Price. The buckled shoes,
perhaps, were not quite right, but the over-all effect was pleasing; he looked
rather romantic, or -as Charles put it-"like some kind of poet from Oxford."
Miss Price examined him with critical eyes and, on the whole, seemed pleased.
With comb and nail scissors, she lightly trimmed the hair behind his ears. "That's
better," she said, as she brushed him down. Modestly proud, she seemed,
as though she had.invented him. "Now let me see your nails. . . ."
Emelius submitted humbly to being turned about-to having his tie knotted and
his collar straightened; this was his homage to a master-craftswoman-one who
would always know best.

   
They arranged to make tea a picnic meal and to take Emelius across the fields
to Pepperinge Eye. It was with no small excitement that they started out on
this expedition. Miss Price herself looked strangely moved as Emelius with sparkling
eyes named each field or wood. There were few changes. Rush Field, Stummets,
Cankerho, these had been the same in his day. Blowditch in Emelius's time had
been called Bloodyditch, an echo of past battles, but Farr Wood was still Farr
Wood, "and still," said Carey, who had walked there often, "as
far." Emelius could not find his father's house in Pepperinge Eye. He thought
it had stood on the site of the present vicarage. They all insisted upon going
into the churchyard to see if, by any chance, Emelius had been buried there.
But he wasn't-at least he couldn't find his own grave. He found, however, the
grave of his aunt- Sarah Ann Hobday-and to his surprise, after scraping the
lichen from the nearly defaced gravestone, he found that she had died on the
twenty-seventh of August, 1666, the day-was it yesterday?-on which the children
had appeared in his rooms. It was like getting a telegram.

   
"Oh, dear," said Miss Price, distressed, "I am so sorry. Perhaps
we had better go home. ..."
"Nay," said Emelius somberly. "Charon waits for all. Better to
live well than to live long. I had not seen her since I was a child. . . ."
He sighed. "Every light has its shadow."
"And it's an ill wind-" began Charles eagerly.

   
Miss Price turned sharply. "What can you mean, Charles?"
"Nothing," said Charles. He looked a little shamefaced and stooped
to pick up a stone.

   
"He's thinking of the house," said Carey. "Couldn't we go and
see it?"
"Well, really, Carey-" began Miss Price. She seemed a little shocked.

   
"I mean, as we're so near? What's the good of going home? We'd only sit
and mope. It might cheer him up," she added quickly. "I mean, it's
his house now. . . ."
"Would it yet be there?" asked Emelius.

   
Miss Price looked thoughtful. "I don't see why it shouldn't be." She
turned to Emelius. "Do you know the way?"
Yes, he knew the way all right-none better-by Tinker's Lane. But this they found
had become a cart track and disappeared into a farm. "Trespassers will
be prosecuted" said a notice on the gate, and a large black dog rushed
out to bark at them.

   
"No matter," Emelius told them. Suddenly taking the lead, he led them
back to the road, and, skirting the farm buildings, he took them through fields
and spinneys to the base of the hill beyond. Miss Price became a little fussed
and disheveled-she was not at her best climbing through hedges.

   
"Are you sure there isn't a bull?" she would ask, perched precariously
on the upper rungs of a five-barred gate.

   
At last, they found the track again-a faint depression in the turfy grass. No
more hedges; the hill swelled steeply above them. There were chalk and harebells
and an occasional clump of beech trees. They followed the curve of the hill
until at last the view widened beneath them and a sweet breeze stole their breath.
Carey found a fossil; Miss Price mislaid a glove.

   
While they were searching, Emelius went ahead; turning a sudden corner, he seemed
to disappear. When at last they came upon him, he was standing in a hollow,
knee-deep in brambles. Among the brambles, there were stones and rubble. It
might well have been the ruin of a house, Carey thought- looking about her-awash
with elder bushes and trailing honeysuckle. Tears of disappointment came to
her eyes. "Was it really here? " she asked, hoping he might be mistaken.

   
"Indeed, yes," Emelius assured her. He seemed elated rather than depressed-as
though this was proof of his having skipped the centuries. He took Miss Price's
hand and helped her down-quite excited he had become, almost boyish-and left
her marooned on a piece of coping while gingerly he jumped from stone to stone,
showing the general layout of the rooms. "Here was the parlor, here the
dairy. This," he explained as he jumped down into a long hollow, "was
the sunken garden where my aunt grew sweet herbs." He kicked the sandy
rubble from some flat stones. "And here the cellar steps." He showed
them where the apple orchard had been and the barn. "It was a comely, neat
house," he repeated proudly. "And none to inherit it save I."
When they reached the main road, a strange incident occurred. Emelius disappeared.
One moment he was walking just behind them, and the next he was nowhere to be
seen. Miss Price stopped Dr. Lamond in his old Ford and asked him if he had
seen, along the road, a young man of Emelius's description.

   
"Yes," said the doctor. "As I turned the corner, he was close
behind you; then he made a dart for that field."
They found Emelius behind the hedge, white and shaking. It was the car that
had unnerved him. His panic, in the face of such a monster, had left no place
for courtesy. It was some time before Miss Price could calm him. When the mail
van passed them later, Emelius stood his ground, but the sweat broke on his
brow, and he quivered like a horse about to shy. He did not speak again until
they reached home.

   
6 MAGIC IN MODERATION
Breaking Emelius into twentieth-century life was not easy, but Miss Price had
great patience. He learned to clean his own shoes and to pass the bread and
butter at tea. He became more modern in his speech, and once was heard to say
O.K. They had no sooner got him used to cars when he saw a jeep, and all their
good work was undone. Airplanes he marveled at, but they did not come close
enough to frighten him. But daily, as he learned more of the state of the world,
modern inventions and the march of "progress," he clung closer to
Miss Price as the one unassailable force in the midst of nightmarish havoc.

   
On warm evenings, after the children were in bed, he would be with Miss Price
in the garden, stripping damsons with a rake (for bottling), and they would
talk about magic. Carey could hear them through her window, their voices rising
and falling in restrained but earnest argument as the damsons pattered into
the basket and the sun sank low behind the trees. "I never scrape the scales
from an adder," she once heard Miss Price say earnestly. "It takes
force from any spell except those in which hemlock is combined with fennel.
The only time I ever scrape the scales from an adder is in spells against St.
Vitus's dance; then for some reason, it gives better results. . . ." Sometimes,
when Emelius had been speaking, Miss Price would exclaim rather scornfully:
"Well, if you want to go back to the wax image and pin school-" and
Carey always wondered what the wax image and pin school was, and why Emelius,
having graduated, should want to go back there.

   
One evening Carey overheard a most curious conversation. It began by Miss Price
saying brightly: "Have you ever tried intrasubstantiary-locomotion? "
There was a mystified silence on the part of Emelius. Then he said, rather uncertainly:
"No. At least, not often." (He had never confessed to Miss Price that,
after a lifetime's study of magic, he had never yet got a spell to work.)
"It's awfully jolly," she went on. "I had a positive craze for
it once." The damsons pattered gently into the basket, and Carey wondered
if Emelius was as curious as she was.

   
Miss Price gave a little laugh. She sounded almost girlish. "Of course^
as spells go, it's child's play. But sometimes the easiest things are the most
effective, don't you think?"
Emelius cleared his throat. "I'm not sure that I haven't got it a little
muddled in my mind," he ventured guardedly. "I may be confusing it
with-"
Miss Price laughed quite gaily. "Oh, you couldn't confuse intrasubstantiary-locomotion
with anything else." She seemed amused.