‘Well, you see one now. I hope you can reverse well, otherwise we shall get terribly tangled up with the staircase. I feel like a corkscrew already.’
The door was suddenly thrown open, and David entered. The room seemed to have grown a good deal, and certainly when he talked to the Mint-man and the manager not long before, it hadn’t got a gallery at one end, and a large throne below it, as it had now. It was quite full of animals with either white ties or tiaras on, talking to each other about the weather. Up in the gallery were the Noah family, seated side by side at an immense piano, which they were all playing on simultaneously. All their heads were close together, for they had only one copy of music to play from, and they kept knocking off each other’s hats, and quarrelling as to when it was time to turn over the page. First of all Noah turned over, and Ham shouted out that he hadn’t got more than half-way down the page, and turned back again, and his mother said she had finished that page five minutes ago, and turned over two. Then they all grabbed at the book together, and tore the pages to bits with one hand while they went on playing with the other. Just as David came in, the book slipped down into the inside of the piano, and so they settled to go on playing by heart. As none of them knew how to read a single note of music, it made no difference whether there was any music there or not.
Below the gallery was the throne, all covered in chintz, and on the throne sat the elegant elephant. The legs of the giraffe were planted about the room, and the body of it went up through the staircase. The elephant still had the cap of the flying-corps on his head, so that David had no doubt that it was he who had been the pilot of one of the aeroplanes.
It seemed evident that the elephant was the host, and as David had been taught always to shake hands with his host when he went to a party, he sidled through the crowd of animals up to the throne.
‘How do you do?’ he said to the elephant.
‘I’m not doing anything at present,’ said the elephant, ‘but when I do, I shall do it very well. Who asked you to come?’
‘Nobody exactly,’ said David, feeling rather uncomfortable. ‘I—I understood I was to.’
‘Have you brought your card?’ asked the elephant.
David looked down and found he was in his sailor clothes again, and pulled a handful of cards out of his pocket.
‘Yes, I’ve got lots of them,’ he said, ‘and all yours too.’