“Thank you very much,” said Philip; “we will think it over.”
But it did not need much thought.
“If we could get a motor car!” said Philip. “If you can get machines by wishing for them.…”
“The very thing,” said Lucy, “let’s find the head-man. We mustn’t wish for a motor or we should have to go on using it. But perhaps there’s some one here who’d like to drive a motor—for his living, you know?”
There was. A Halma man, with an inborn taste for machinery, had long pined to leave the gathering of pine-apples to others. He was induced to wish for a motor and a B.S.A. sixty horse-power car snorted suddenly in the place where a moment before no car was.
“Oh, the luxury! This is indeed like home,” sighed Brenda, curling up on the air-cushions.
And the children certainly felt a gloriously restful sensation. Nothing to be done; no need to think or bother. Just to sit quiet and be borne swiftly on through wonderful cities, all of which Philip vaguely remembered to have seen, small and near, and built by his own hands and Helen’s.
And so, at last, they came close to Polistopolis. Philip never could tell how it was that he stopped the car outside the city. It must have been some quite unaccountable instinct, because naturally, you know, when you are not used to being driven in motors, you like to dash up to the house you are going to, and enjoy your friends’ enjoyment of the grand way in which you have travelled. But Philip felt—in that quite certain and quite unexplainable way in which you do feel things sometimes—that it was best to stop the car among the suburban groves of southernwood, and to creep into the town in the disguise afforded by motor coats, motor veils and motor goggles. (For of course all these had come with the motor car when it was wished for, because no motor car is complete without them.)
They said good-bye warmly to the Halma motor man, and went quietly towards the town, Max and Brenda keeping to heel in the most praiseworthy way, and the parrot nestling inside Philip’s jacket, for it was chilled by the long rush through the evening air.
And now the scattered houses and spacious gardens gave place to the streets of Polistopolis, the capital of the kingdom. And the streets were strangely deserted. The children both felt—in that quite certain and unexplainable way—that it would be unwise of them to go to the place where they had slept the last time they were in that city.
The whole party was very tired. Max walked with drooping tail, and Brenda was whining softly to herself from sheer weariness and weak-mindedness. The parrot alone was happy—or at least contented. Because it was asleep.
At the corner of a little square planted with southernwood-trees in tubs, Philip called a halt.
“Where shall we go?” he said; “let us put it to the vote.”
And even as he spoke, he saw a dark form creeping along in the shadow of the houses.
“Who goes there?” Philip cried with proper spirit, and the answer surprised him, all the more that it was given with a kind of desperate bravado.
“I go here; I, Plumbeus, Captain of the old Guard of Polistopolis.”
“Oh, it’s you!” cried Philip; “I am glad. You can advise us. Where can we go to sleep? Somehow or other I don’t care to go to the house where we stayed before.”
The captain made no answer. He simply caught at the hands of Lucy and Philip, dragged them through a low arched doorway and, as soon as the long lengths of Brenda and Max had slipped through, closed the door.
“Safe,” he said in a breathless way, which made Philip feel that safety was the last thing one could count on at that moment.
“Now, speak low, who knows what spies may be listening? I am a plain man. I speak as I think. You came out of the unknown. You may be the Deliverer or the Destroyer. But I am a judge of faces—always was from a boy—and I cannot believe that this countenance of apple-cheeked innocence is that of a Destroyer.”
Philip was angry and Lucy was furious. So he said nothing. And she said:
“Apple-cheeked yourself!” which was very rude.
“I see that you are annoyed,” said the captain in the dark, where, of course, he could see nothing; “but in calling your friend apple-cheeked I was merely offering the highest compliment in my power. The absence of fruit in this city is, I suppose, the reason why our compliments are like that. I believe poets say ‘sweet as a rose’—we say ‘sweet as an orange.’ May I be allowed unreservedly to apologise?”
“Oh, that’s all right,” said Philip awkwardly.
“And to ask whether you are the Deliverer?”
“I hope so,” said Philip modestly.
“Of course he is,” said the parrot, putting its head out from the front of Philip’s jacket; “and he has done six deeds out of the seven already.”
“It is time that deeds were done here,” said the captain. “I’ll make a light and get you some supper. I’m in hiding here; but the walls are thick and all the shutters are shut.”
He bolted a door and opened the slide of a dark lantern.
“Some of us have taken refuge in the old prison,” he said; “it’s never used, you know, so her spies don’t infest it as they do every other part of the city.”
“Whose spies?”
“The Destroyer’s,” said the captain, getting bread and milk out of a cupboard; “at least, if you’re the Deliverer she must be that. But she says she’s the Deliverer.”
He lighted candles and set them on the table as Lucy asked eagerly:
“What Destroyer? Is it a horrid woman in a motor veil?”
“You’ve guessed it,” said the captain gloomily.
“It’s that Pretenderette,” said Philip. “Does Mr. Noah know? What has she been doing?”
“Everything you can think of,” said the captain; “she says she’s Queen, and that she’s done the seven deeds. And Mr. Noah doesn’t know, because she’s set a guard round the city, and no message can get out or in.”
“The Hippogriff?” said Lucy.
“Yes, of course I thought of that,” said the captain. “And so did she. She’s locked it up and thrown the key into one of the municipal wells.”
“But why do the guards obey her?” Philip asked.
“They’re not our guards, of course,” the captain answered. “They’re strange soldiers that she got out of a book. She got the people to pull down the Hall of Justice by pretending there was fruit in the gigantic books it’s built with. And when the book was opened these soldiers came marching out. The Sequani and the Aedui they call themselves. And when you’ve finished supper we ought to hold a council. There are a lot of us here. All sorts. Distinctions of rank are forgotten in times of public peril.”
Some twenty or thirty people presently
