“I say,” said Elfrida, “my fluffy coat says ‘Go!’ Doesn’t yours?”
“It would if I’d listen to it,” said Edred carelessly.
The soldiers were quite near now—so near that Elfrida could see how fierce they looked. And she knew that they were the same soldiers who had hammered so loud and so hard at the door of Arden House, in Soho. They must have ridden all night. So she screwed her mind up to make poetry, just as you screw your muscles up to jump a gate or run a hundred yards. And almost before she knew that she was screwing it up at all the screw had acted and she had screwed out a piece of Mouldiwarp poetry and was saying it aloud—
“Dear Mouldiwarp, since Cousin Dick
Buys his beautiful flags from Gamage’s,
Take us away, and take us quick,
Before the soldiers do us any damages.”
And the moment she had said it, the white magic coats grew up and grew down and wrapped the children up as tight and as soft as ever a silkworm wrapped itself when it was tired of being a silkworm and entered into its cocoon, as the first step towards being a person with wings.
Can you imagine what it would be like to have lovely liquid sleep emptied on you by the warm tubful? That is what it felt like inside the white, wonderful cocoons. The children knew that the tower was turning wrong way up and inside out, but it didn’t matter a bit. Sleep was raining down on them in magic showers—no; it was closing on them, closer and closer, nearer and nearer, soft, delicious layers of warm delight. A soft, humming sound was in their ears, like the sound of bees when you push through a bed of Canterbury bells, and the next thing that happened was that they came out of the past into the present with a sort of snap of light and a twist of sound. It was like coming out of a railway tunnel into daylight.
The magic coverlet-coat-cocoons had even saved them the trouble of changing into their own clothes, for they found that the stiff, heavy clothes had gone, and they were dressed in the little ordinary things that they had always been used to.