They were all talking about the carpet, but what they were all thinking about was the Phoenix.
The golden bird had been so kind, so friendly, so polite, so instructive—and now it had set fire to a theatre and made mother ill.
Nobody blamed the bird. It had acted in a perfectly natural manner. But every one saw that it must not be asked to prolong its visit. Indeed, in plain English it must be asked to go!
The four children felt like base spies and treacherous friends; and each in its mind was saying who ought not to be the one to tell the Phoenix that there could no longer be a place for it in that happy home in Camden Town. Each child was quite sure that one of them ought to speak out in a fair and manly way, but nobody wanted to be the one.
They could not talk the whole thing over as they would have liked to do, because the Phoenix itself was in the cupboard, among the blackbeetles and the odd shoes and the broken chessmen.
But Anthea tried.
‘It’s very horrid. I do hate thinking things about people, and not being able to say the things you’re thinking because of the way they would feel when they thought what things you were thinking, and wondered what they’d done to make you think things like that, and why you were thinking them.’
Anthea was so anxious that the Phoenix should not understand what she said that she made a speech completely baffling to all. It was not till she pointed to the cupboard in which all believed the Phoenix to be that Cyril understood.
‘Yes,’ he said, while Jane and Robert were trying to tell each other how deeply they didn’t understand what Anthea were saying; ‘but after recent eventfulnesses a new leaf has to be turned over, and, after all, mother is more important than the feelings of any of the lower forms of creation, however unnatural.’
‘How beautifully you do do it,’ said Anthea, absently beginning to build a card-house for the Lamb—‘mixing up what you’re saying, I mean. We ought to practise doing it so as to be ready for mysterious occasions. We’re talking about THAT,’ she said to Jane and Robert, frowning, and nodding towards the cupboard where the Phoenix was. Then Robert and Jane understood, and each opened its mouth to speak.