When all the leaves were plucked from the window’s square, and only the brown ivy boughs left, she turned back to the room. The furniture was all powdered heavily with dust, and what had made the floor so soft to walk upon was the thick carpet of dust that lay there. There was the table on which the Chevalier St. George—no, Sir Edward Talbot—had set the tray. There were the chairs, and there, sure enough, was the corner cupboard in which he had put the jewels. Elfrida got its door open with I don’t know what of mingled hopes and fears. It had three shelves, but the jewels were on none of them. In fact there was nothing on any of them. But on the inside of the door her hand, as she held it open, felt something rough. And when she looked it was a name carved, and when she swung the door well back so that the light fell full on it she saw that the name was “E. Talbot.” So then she knew that all she had seen in that room before must have really happened two hundred years before, and was not just a piece of magic Mouldiwarpiness.
She climbed up on the chair again and looked out through the little window. She could see nothing of the Castle walls—only the distant shoulder of the downs and the path that cut across it towards the station. She would have liked to see a red figure or a violet one coming along that path. But there was no figure on it at all.
What do you usually do when you are shut up in a secret room, with no chance of getting out for hours? As for me, I always say poetry to myself. It is one of the uses of poetry—one says it to oneself in distressing circumstances of that kind, or when one has to wait at railway stations, or when one cannot get to sleep at night. You will find poetry most useful for this purpose. So learn plenty of it, and be sure it is the best kind, because this is most useful as well as most agreeable.
“SHE SAW THAT THE NAME WAS ‘E. TALBOT.’”
Elfrida began with “Ruin seize thee, ruthless King!” but there were parts of that which she liked best when there were other people about—so she stopped it, and began “Horatius and the Bridge.” This lasts a long time. Then came the Favourite Cat drowned in a tub of Gold-fish—and in the middle of that, quite suddenly, and I don’t know why, she thought of the Mouldiwarp.
“We didn’t quite quarrel,” she told herself. “At least not really, truly quarrelling. I might try anyhow.”
So she set to work to make a piece of poetry to call up the Mouldiwarp with.
This was how, after a long time, the first piece came out—
“‘The Mouldiwarp of Arden