'Nothing,' said Blue Mantle, 'is too good for the Chosen of the Gods.
All that we have is yours, to the very last day of your life you have
only to command, and we obey. You will like to eat in seclusion. And
afterwards you will let us behold the whole person of the Chosen of the
Gods.'
Quentin retired into the purple tent, with the fruits and the cocoa-nut.
As you know, a cocoa-nut is not handy to get at the inside of, at the
best of times, so Quentin set that aside, meaning to ask Blue Mantle
later on for a gimlet and a hammer.
When he had had enough to eat he peeped out again. Blue Mantle was on
the watch and came quickly forward.
'Now,' said he, very crossly indeed, 'tell me how you got here. This
Chosen of the Gods business is all very well for the vulgar. But you and
I know that there is no such thing as magic.'
'Speak for yourself,' said Quentin. 'If I'm not here by magic I'm not
here at all.'
'Yes, you are,' said Blue Mantle.
'I know I am,' said Quentin, 'but if I'm not here by magic what am I
here by?'
'Stowawayishness,' said Blue Mantle.
'If you think that why don't you treat me as a stowaway?'
'Because of public opinion,' said Blue Mantle, rubbing his nose in an
angry sort of perplexedness.
'Very well,' said Quentin, who was feeling so surprised and bewildered
that it was a real relief to him to bully somebody. 'Now look here. I
came here by magic, accidental magic. I belong to quite a different
world from yours. But perhaps you are right about my being the Chosen of
the Gods. And I sha'n't tell you anything about my world. But I command
you, by the Sacred Tau' (he had been quick enough to catch and remember
the word), 'to tell me who you are, and where you come from, and where
you are going.'
Blue Mantle shrugged his shoulders. 'Oh, well,' he said, 'if you invoke
the sacred names of Power.... But I don't call it fair play. Especially
as you know perfectly well, and just want to browbeat me into telling
lies. I shall not tell lies. I shall tell you the truth.'
'I hoped you would,' said Quentin gently.
'Well then,' said Blue Mantle, 'I am a Priest of Poseidon, and I come
from the great and immortal kingdom of Atlantis.'
'From the temple where the gold statue is, with the twelve sea-horses in
gold?' Quentin asked eagerly.
'Ah, I knew you knew all about it,' said Blue Mantle, 'so I don't need
to tell you that I am taking the sacred stone, on which you are sitting
(profanely if you are a mere stowaway, and not the Chosen of the Gods)
to complete the splendid structure of a temple built on a great plain in
the second of the islands which are our colonies in the North East.'
'Tell me all about Atlantis,' said Quentin. And the priest, protesting
that Quentin knew as much about it as he did, told.
And all the time the ship was ploughing through the waves, sometimes
sailing, sometimes rowed by hidden rowers with long oars. And Quentin
was served in all things as though he had been a king. If he had
insisted that he was not the Chosen of the Gods everything might have
been different. But he did not. And he was very anxious to show how much
he knew about Atlantis. And sometimes he was wrong, the Priest said, but
much more often he was right.
'We are less than three days' journey now from the Eastern Isles,' Blue
Mantle said one day, 'and I warn you that if you are a mere stowaway you
had better own it. Because if you persist in calling yourself the Chosen
of the Gods you will be expected to act as such--to the very end.'
'I don't call myself anything,' said Quentin, 'though I am not a
stowaway, anyhow, and I don't know how I came here--so of course it was
magic. It's simply silly your being so cross. _I_ can't help being here.
Let's be friends.'
'Well,' said Blue Mantle, much less crossly, 'I never believed in magic,
though I _am_ a priest, but if it is, it is. We may as well be friends,
as you call it. It isn't for very long, anyway,' he added mysteriously.
[Illustration: The cart was drawn by an enormous creature, more like an
elephant than anything else.]
And then to show his friendliness he took Quentin all over the ship, and
explained it all to him. And Quentin enjoyed himself thoroughly, though
every now and then he had to pinch himself to make sure that he was
awake. And he was fed well all the time, and all the time made much of,
so that when the ship reached land he was quite sorry. The ship anchored
by a stone quay, most solid and serviceable, and every one was very
busy.
Quentin kept out of sight behind the purple curtains. The sailors and
the priests and the priests' attendants and everybody on the boat had
asked him so many questions, and been so curious about his clothes, that
he was not anxious to hear any more questions asked, or to have to
invent answers to them.
And after a very great deal of talk--almost as much as Mr. Miles's
carrying had needed--the altar stone was lifted, Quentin, curtains,
awning and all, and carried along a gangway to the shore, and there it
was put on a sort of cart, more like what people in Manchester call a
lurry than anything else I can think of. The wheels were made of solid
circles of wood bound round with copper. And the cart was drawn by--not
horses or donkeys or oxen or even dogs--but by an enormous creature more
like an elephant than anything else, only it had long hair rather like
the hair worn by goats.
You, perhaps, would not have known what this vast creature was, but
Quentin, who had all sorts of out-of-the-way information packed in his
head, knew at once that it was a mammoth.
And by that he knew, too, that he had slipped back many thousands of
years, because, of course, it is a very long time indeed since there
were any mammoths alive, and able to draw lurries. And the car and the
priest and the priest's retinue and the stone and Quentin and the
mammoth journeyed slowly away from the coast, passing through great
green forests and among strange gray mountains.
Where were they journeying?
Quentin asked the same question you may be sure, and Blue Mantle told
him--
'To Stonehenge.' And Quentin understood him perfectly, though
Stonehenge was not the word Blue Mantle used, or anything like it.
'The great temple is now complete,' he said, 'all but the altar stone.
It will be the most wonderful temple ever built in any of the colonies
of Atlantis. And it will be consecrated on the longest day of the year.'
'Midsummer Day,' said Quentin thoughtlessly--and, as usual, anxious to
tell all he knew. 'I know. The sun strikes through the arch on to the
altar stone at sunrise. Hundreds of people go to see it: the ruins are
quite crowded sometimes, I believe.'
'Ruins?' said the priest in a terrible voice. 'Crowded? Ruins?'
'I mean,' said Quentin hastily, 'the sun will still shine the same way
even when the temple is in ruins, won't it?'
'The temple,' said the priest, 'is built to defy time. It will never be
in ruins.'
'That's all _you_ know,' said Quentin, not very politely.
'It is not by any means all I know,' said the priest. 'I do not tell all
I know. Nor do you.'
'I used to,' said Quentin, 'but I sha'n't any more. It only leads to
trouble--I see that now.'
Now, though Quentin had been intensely interested in everything he had
seen in the ship and on the journey, you may be sure he had not lost
sight of the need there was to get back out of this time of Atlantis
into his own time. He knew that he must have got into these Atlantean
times by some very simple accidental magic, and he felt no doubt that he
should get back in the same way. He felt almost sure that the
reverse-action, so to speak, of the magic would begin when the stone got
back to the place where it had lain for so many thousand years before he
happened to go to sleep on it, and to start--perhaps by the St. John's
wort--the accidental magic. If only, when he got back there he could
think of the compelling, the magic word!
And now the slow procession wound over the downs, and far away across
the plain, which was almost just the same then as it is now, Quentin saw
what he knew must be Stonehenge. But it was no longer the grey pile of
ruins that you have perhaps seen--or have, at any rate, seen pictures
of.
From afar one could see the gleam of yellow gold and red copper; the
flutter of purple curtains, the glitter and dazzle of shimmering silver.
As they drew near to the spot Quentin perceived that the great stones he
remembered were overlaid with ornamental work, with vivid,
bright-coloured paintings. The whole thing was a great circular
building, every stone in its place. At a mile or two distant lay a town.
And in that town, with every possible luxury, served with every
circumstance of servile homage, Quentin ate and slept.
I wish I had time to tell you what that town was like where he slept and
ate, but I have not. You can read for yourself, some day, what Atlantis
was like. Plato tells us a good deal, and the Colonies of Atlantis must
have had at least a reasonable second-rate copy of the cities of that
fair and lovely land.
That night, for the first time since he had first gone to sleep on the
altar stone, Quentin slept apart from it. He lay on a wooden couch
strewn with soft bear-skins, and a woollen coverlet was laid over him.
And he slept soundly.
In the middle of the night, as it seemed, Blue Mantle woke him.
'Come,' he said, 'Chosen of the Gods--since you _will_ be that, and no
stowaway--the hour draws nigh.'
The mammoth was waiting. Quentin and Blue Mantle rode on its back to the
outer porch of the new temple of Stonehenge. Rows of priests and
attendants, robed in white and blue and purple, formed a sort of avenue
up which Blue Mantle led the Chosen of the Gods, who was Quentin. They
took off his jacket and put a white dress on him, rather like a
night-shirt without sleeves. And they put a thick wreath of London Pride
on his head and another, larger and longer, round his neck.
'If only the chaps at school could see me now!' he said to himself
proudly.
And by this time it was gray dawn.
'Lie down now,' said Blue Mantle, 'lie down, O Beloved of the Gods, upon
the altar stone, for the last time.'
'I shall be able to go, then?' Quentin asked. This accidental magic was,
he perceived, a tricky thing, and he wanted to be sure.
'You will not be able to stay,' said the priest. 'If going is what you
desire, the desire of the Chosen of the Gods is fully granted.'
The grass on the plain far and near rustled with the tread of many feet;
the cold air of dawn thrilled to the awed murmured of many voices.
Quentin lay down, with his pink wreaths and his white robe, and watched
the quickening pinkiness of the East. And slowly the great circle of the
temple filled with white-robed folk, all carrying in their hands the
faint pinkiness of the flowers which we nowadays call London Pride.
And all eyes were fixed on the arch through which, at sunrise on
Midsummer Day, the sun's first beam should fall upon the white, new,
clean altar stone. The stone is still there, after all these thousands
of years, and at sunrise on Midsummer Day the sun's first ray still
falls on it.
[Illustration: 'Silence,' cried the priest. 'Chosen of the Immortals,
close your eyes!']
The sky grew lighter and lighter, and at last the sun peered redly over
the down, and the first ray of the morning sunlight fell full on the
altar stone and on the face of Quentin.
And, as it did so, a very tall, white-robed priest with a deer-skin
apron and a curious winged head-dress stepped forward. He carried a
great bronze knife, and he waved it ten times in the shaft of sunlight
that shot through the arch and on to the altar stone.
'Thus,' he cried, 'thus do I bathe the sacred blade in the pure fountain
of all light, all wisdom, all splendour. In the name of the ten kings,
the ten virtues, the ten hopes, the ten fears I make my weapon clean!
May this temple of our love and our desire endure for ever, so long as
the glory of our Lord the Sun is shed upon this earth. May the sacrifice
I now humbly and proudly offer be acceptable to the gods by whom it has
been so miraculously provided. Chosen of the Gods! return to the gods
who sent thee!'
A roar of voices rang through the temple. The bronze knife was raised
over Quentin. He could not believe that this, this horror, was the end
of all these wonderful happenings.
'No--no,' he cried, 'it's not true. I'm not the Chosen of the Gods! I'm
only a little boy that's got here by accidental magic!'
'Silence,' cried the priest, 'Chosen of the Immortals, close your eyes!
It will not hurt. This life is only a dream; the other life is the real
life. Be strong, be brave!'
Quentin was not brave. But he shut his eyes. He could not help it. The
glitter of the bronze knife in the sunlight was too strong for him.
He could not believe that this could really have happened to him. Every
one had been so kind--so friendly to him. And it was all for this!
Suddenly a sharp touch at his side told him that for this, indeed, it
had all been. He felt the point of the knife.
'Mother!' he cried. And opened his eyes again.
He always felt quite sure afterwards that 'Mother' was the master-word,
the spell of spells. For when he opened his eyes there was no priest, no
white-robed worshippers, no splendour of colour and metal, no Chosen of
the Gods, no knife--only a little boy with a piece of sacking over him,
damp with the night dews, lying on a stone amid the grey ruins of
Stonehenge, and, all about him, a crowd of tourists who had come to see
the sun's first shaft strike the age-old altar of Stonehenge on
Midsummer Day in the morning. And instead of a knife point at his side
there was only the ferrule of the umbrella of an elderly and retired tea
merchant in a mackintosh and an Alpine hat,--a ferrule which had prodded
the sleeping boy so unexpectedly surprised on the very altar stone where
the sun's ray now lingered.
And then, in a moment, he knew that he had not uttered the spell in
vain, the word of compelling, the word of power: for his mother was
there kneeling beside him. I am sorry to say that he cried as he clung
to her. _We_ cannot all of us be brave, always.
The tourists were very kind and interested, and the tea merchant
insisted on giving Quentin something out of a flask, which was so nasty
that Quentin only pretended to drink, out of politeness. His mother had
a carriage waiting, and they escaped to it while the tourists were
saying, 'How romantic!' and asking each other whatever in the world had
happened.
* * * * *
'But how _did_ you come to be there, darling?' said his mother with warm
hands comfortingly round him. 'I've been looking for you all night. I
went to say good-bye to you yesterday--Oh, Quentin--and I found you'd
run away. How _could_ you?'
'I'm sorry,' said Quentin, 'if it worried you, I'm sorry. Very, very. I
was going to telegraph to-day.'
'But where have you been? What have you been doing all night?' she
asked, caressing him.
'Is it only one night?' said Quentin. 'I don't know exactly what's
happened. It was accidental magic, I think, mother. I'm glad I thought
of the right word to get back, though.' And then he told her all about
it. She held him very tightly and let him talk.
Perhaps she thought that a little boy to whom accidental magic happened
all in a minute, like that, was not exactly the right little boy for
that excellent school in Salisbury. Anyhow she took him to Egypt with
her to meet his father, and, on the way, they happened to see a doctor
in London who said: 'Nerves' which is a poor name for accidental magic,
and Quentin does not believe it means the same thing at all.
Quentin's father is well now, and he has left the army, and father and
mother and Quentin live in a jolly, little, old house in Salisbury, and
Quentin is a 'day boy' at that very same school. He and Smithson minor
are the greatest of friends. But he has never told Smithson minor about
the accidental magic. He has learned now, and learned very thoroughly,
that it is not always wise to tell all you know. If he had not owned
that he knew that it was the Stonehenge altar stone!
* * * * *
You may think that the accidental magic was all a dream, and that
Quentin dreamed it because his mother had told him so much about
Atlantis. But then, how do you account for his dreaming so much that his
mother had never told him? You think that that part wasn't true, well,
it may have been true for anything I know. And I am sure you don't know
more about it than I do.