“Put your white handkerchief over your face and talk through it, and then you may.”
By a most fortunate and unusual chance, Elfrida’s handkerchief was white: it was, in fact, still folded in the sixteen blameless squares into which the laundress had ironed it. She threw it over her face as she lay back on the turf and spoke through it.
“I’d like to see the nurse witch again,” she said.
“Instead of Cousin Richard?”
“No: as well as.”
“That’s right,” said the magic mole. “You shouldn’t change your wishes; but there’s no rule against enlarging them—on the contrary. Now look!”
Elfrida whisked away the handkerchief and looked.
Have you ever noticed the way the bath water runs away when you pull up the bath tap? Have you ever seen bottles filled through a funnel?
The white Mouldiwarp reached up its hands—its front feet I ought perhaps to say—towards the deep-blue sky, where white clouds herded together like giant sheep.
And it spoke. At least, it did not speak, but it sang. Yet I don’t know that you could call it singing either. It was more like the first notes that a violin yields to the bow wielded by the hand of a master musician. And the white clouds stooped to answer it. Round and round in the blue sky they circled, drawing together and swirling down, as the bath water draws and swirls when you pull up the knob labelled “Waste”—round and round till they showed like a vast white funnel whose neck hung, a great ring, above the group on the dry grass of the downs. It stooped and stooped. The ring fitted down over them, they were in a white tower, narrow at its base where that base touched the grass, but widening to the blue sky overhead.