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 Chapter 1: Lucy Looks into a Wardrobe
Once there were four children whose names were Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy.
This story is about something that happened to them when they
were sent away from London during the war because of the air-raids.
They were sent to the house of an old Professor who lived in
the heart of the country, ten miles from the nearest railway
station and two miles from the nearest post office. He had no
wife and he lived in a very large house with a housekeeper called
Mrs Macready and three servants. (Their names were Ivy, Margaret
and Betty, but they do not come into the story much.) He himself
was a very old man with shaggy white hair which grew over most
of his face as well as on his head, and they liked him almost
at once; but on the first evening when he came out to meet them
at the front door he was so odd-looking that Lucy (who was the
youngest) was a little afraid of him, and Edmund (who was the
next youngest) wanted to laugh and had to keep on pretending
he was blowing his nose to hide it.
As soon as they had said goodnight to the Professor
and gone upstairs on the first night, the boys came into the
girls' room and they all talked it over.
"We've fallen on our feet and no mistake,"
said Peter. "This is going to be perfectly splendid. That
old chap will let us do anything we like."
"I think he's an old dear," said Susan.
"Oh, come off it!" said Edmund, who
was tired and pretending not to be tired, which always made
him bad-tempered. "Don't go on talking like that."
"Like what?" said Susan; "and anyway,
it's time you were in bed."
"Trying to talk like Mother," said Edmund.
"And who are you to say when I'm to go to bed? Go to bed
yourself."
"Hadn't we all better go to bed?" said
Lucy. "There's sure to be a row if we're heard talking
here."
"No there won't," said Peter. "I
tell you this is the sort of house where no one's going to mind
what we do. Anyway, they won't hear us. It's about ten minutes'
walk from here down to that dining-room, and any amount of stairs
and passages in between."
"What's that noise?" said Lucy suddenly.
It was a far larger house than she had ever been in before and
the thought of all those long passages and rows of doors leading
into empty rooms was beginning to make her feel a little creepy.
"It's only a bird, silly," said Edmund.
"It's an owl," said Peter. "This
is going to be a wonderful place for birds. I shall go to bed
now. I say, let's go and explore tomorrow. You might find anything
in a place like this. Did you see those mountains as we came
along? And the woods? There might be eagles. There might be
stags. There'll be hawks."
"Badgers!" said Lucy.
"Foxes!" said Edmund.
"Rabbits!" said Susan.
But when the next morning came there was a steady
rain falling, so thick that when you looked out of the window
you could see neither the mountains nor the woods nor even the
stream in the garden.
"Of course it would be raining!" said
Edmund. They had just finished their breakfast with the Professor
and were upstairs in the room he had set apart for them - a
long, low room with two windows looking out in one direction
and two in another.
"Do stop grumbling, Ed," said Susan.
"Ten to one it'll clear up in an hour or so. And in the
meantime we're pretty well off. There's a wireless and lots
of books."
"Not for me," said Peter; "I'm
going to explore in the house."
Everyone agreed to this and that was how the adventures
began. It was the sort of house that you never seem to come
to the end of, and it was full of unexpected places. The first
few doors they tried led only into spare bedrooms, as everyone
had expected that they would; but soon they came to a very long
room full of pictures, and there they found a suit of armour;
and after that was a room all hung with green, with a harp in
one corner; and then came three steps down and five steps up,
and then a kind of little upstairs hall and a door that led
out on to a balcony, and then a whole series of rooms that led
into each other and were lined with books - most of them very
old books and some bigger than a Bible in a church. And shortly
after that they looked into a room that was quite empty except
for one big wardrobe; the sort that has a looking-glass in the
door. There was nothing else in the room at all except a dead
bluebottle on the window-sill.
"Nothing there!" said Peter, and they
all trooped out again - all except Lucy. She stayed behind because
she thought it would be worthwhile trying the door of the wardrobe,
even though she felt almost sure that it would be locked. To
her surprise it opened quite easily, and two mothballs dropped
out.
Looking into the inside, she saw several coats
hanging up - mostly long fur coats. There was nothing Lucy liked
so much as the smell and feel of fur. She immediately stepped
into the wardrobe and got in among the coats and rubbed her
face against them, leaving the door open, of course, because
she knew that it is very foolish to shut oneself into any wardrobe.
Soon she went further in and found that there was a second row
of coats hanging up behind the first one. It was almost quite
dark in there and she kept her arms stretched out in front of
her so as not to bump her face into the back of the wardrobe.
She took a step further in - then two or three steps - always
expecting to feel woodwork against the tips of her fingers.
But she could not feel it.
"This must be a simply enormous wardrobe!"
thought Lucy, going still further in and pushing the soft folds
of the coats aside to make room for her. Then she noticed that
there was something crunching under her feet. "I wonder
is that more mothballs?" she thought, stooping down to
feel it with her hand. But instead of feeling the hard, smooth
wood of the floor of the wardrobe, she felt something soft and
powdery and extremely cold. "This is very queer,"
she said, and went on a step or two further.
Next moment she found that what was rubbing against
her face and hands was no longer soft fur but something hard
and rough and even prickly. "Why, it is just like branches
of trees!" exclaimed Lucy. And then she saw that there
was a light ahead of her; not a few inches away where the back
of the wardrobe ought to have been, but a long way off. Something
cold and soft was falling on her. A moment later she found that
she was standing in the middle of a wood at night-time with
snow under her feet and snowflakes falling through the air.
Lucy felt a little frightened, but she felt very
inquisitive and excited as well. She looked back over her shoulder
and there, between the dark tree-trunks, she could still see
the open doorway of the wardrobe and even catch a glimpse of
the empty room from which she had set out. (She had, of course,
left the door open, for she knew that it is a very silly thing
to shut oneself into a wardrobe.) It seemed to be still daylight
there. "I can always get back if anything goes wrong,"
thought Lucy. She began to walk forward, crunch-crunch over
the snow and through the wood towards the other light. In about
ten minutes she reached it and found it was a lamp-post. As
she stood looking at it, wondering why there was a lamp-post
in the middle of a wood and wondering what to do next, she heard
a pitter patter of feet coming towards her. And soon after that
a very strange person stepped out from among the trees into
the light of the lamp-post.
He was only a little taller than Lucy herself
and he carried over his head an umbrella, white with snow. From
the waist upwards he was like a man, but his legs were shaped
like a goat's (the hair on them was glossy black) and instead
of feet he had goat's hoofs. He also had a tail, but Lucy did
not notice this at first because it was neatly caught up over
the arm that held the umbrella so as to keep it from trailing
in the snow. He had a red woollen muffler round his neck, and
his skin was rather reddish too. He had a strange, but pleasant
little face, with a short pointed beard and curly hair, and
out of the hair there stuck two horns, one on each side of his
forehead. One of his hands, as I have said, held the umbrella;
in the other arm he carried several brown-paper parcels. What
with the parcels and the snow it looked just as if he had been
doing his Christmas shopping. He was a Faun. And when he saw
Lucy he gave such a start of surprise that he dropped all his
parcels.
"Goodness gracious me!" exclaimed the
Faun.
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