Chapter 6 Chapter 5. Back to the side of the cupboard door

Because Peter and Susan were still playing hide-and-seek, it took Edmund and Lucy a long time to find them.When they were all assembled in the long room where the armor was kept, Lucy said aloud: "Peter! Susan! That's right. Edmund saw it too. There is a country there, which can be entered through the wardrobe. Edmund and I have been in it, and told them all about it." "Ed, what the hell is going on?" Peter asked. Now we come to the most unpleasant part of this story.Up to this point Edmund had been feeling very uncomfortable and angry with Lucy, but he had not yet made up his mind what to do with Lucy.Now that Peter asked him the question out of the blue, he broke his mind and decided to do the most disgraceful thing he could think of to do Lucy a favor.

"Tell us, Ed," Susan said. Ed had a demure air about him, as if he were much older than Lucy (actually they were only a year apart).He chuckled and said: "Oh, yes, Lucy and I have been playing games, and she deliberately said that the story about a country in the closet told last time is true. Of course, we were just joking, in fact, there Nothing." Poor Lucy took one look at Edmund, and ran out of the house in one breath. Edmund was now becoming more and more disgraceful. He thought he had achieved great success, and immediately went on: "She's gone again, is she enchanted or something? Children just like to play tricks. They're always..."

"Listen," said Peter, turning and fixing his eyes on him, in great indignation, "shut up! You've been yelling at her since she'd babbled about the wardrobe last time, Now you hid in the closet with her and played games, and you made her go away again. I think you have no good intentions in doing this." "But she's talking nonsense," said Edmund, surprised by Peter's words. "It's all gibberish, of course," said Peter, "and that's where the seriousness of the problem lies. At home, Lu is all right, but in the country she looks either out of her mind or lying. But In either case, if you think about it, if you laugh at her and babble at her one day, and you go on and on about her the next day, how does that help her?"

"I thought, I thought..." said Edmund, but he could think of nothing to say. "What are you thinking," said Peter, "you're thinking bad ideas. You always like that with kids younger than you, and we used to see you like that a lot at school." "Come on," said Susan. "What's the use of complaining to each other? We'd better go and find Lucy." They searched for a long time before they found Lucy.Sure enough, as everyone expected, she was crying sadly.No matter what they said, Lucy insisted that what she said was true. "Whatever you think and what you say, I don't care. You can tell the professor, you can write to your mother, you can do whatever you want. All I know is that I met a Faun there. If only I stayed there! You're a real insult."

It was a very unpleasant night.Lucy felt aggrieved, and Edmund began to feel that his plan was not working as he expected.The two older children really thought Lucy was out of her mind.Long after she had fallen asleep, they were still standing in the corridor talking quietly. The next morning, they decided to tell the professor all about it. "If he thinks there's really something wrong with Lucy, he'll write to papa," said Peter. "We can't do that." So they knocked on the door of the old professor's study.The professor said "Come in", stood up, found a chair for them to sit down, and said that if there was anything to do, just come to him, and he would be happy to help them.Then he sat down, put his fingers together, and listened quietly to the whole story.After listening to it, he was silent for a long time, and at last he cleared his throat and asked unexpectedly:

"How can you be sure that Lucy's story is not true?" "Oh, but..." Susan stopped when she was about to speak.It can be seen from the old man's face that he is very serious.After a while Susan plucked up her courage and said, "But Edmund himself told us they were just pretending." "There is one crucial question which deserves your careful consideration," said the professor. "From your experience—forgive me for asking this question—who do you think is more honest, your brother or your sister?" "That's a very interesting question, sir," said Peter. "Until now, I should say that Lucy is more honest than Edmund."

"What do you think, my dear boy?" the professor turned to Susan again. "Well," said Susan, "I basically agree with Peter. But the story about the woods and the fauns can't always be true." "That question is not clear to me," said the professor, "but it is a very serious matter to casually accuse a person of a lie who you all believe to be honest." "Our concern is not that Lucy is lying," Susan said. "We think that Lucy is probably mentally ill." "You mean to say she's gone crazy?" the professor said very calmly, "Well, it's easy for you to judge. You just need to observe her face and talk to her, and you can tell."

"But..." Susan stopped talking as soon as she opened her mouth.She never dreamed that a grown-up like the Professor would say such things, and she was really confused. "Logic!" said the professor, mostly to himself, "why don't these schools teach you a little logic these days? There are only three possibilities: either your sister is telling a lie, or she is insane. No, she's telling the truth. You say she never lied, and she's not mentally ill. So until we find more evidence, we can only assume that she's telling the truth." Susan had her eyes fixed on him, and from the expression on his face she was sure he was not joking with them.

"But how is that possible, sir?" asked Peter. "Why must it be impossible?" The professor asked back. "Because," said Peter, "if it's true, why doesn't everyone find the country every time they go into the cupboard? Once, when we went into the cupboard, we found nothing else at all. Qian took us to see it herself, and she didn't say she saw anything else." "What does it matter?" said the professor. "It does, sir. If it's true, those things should always be there." "Always?" asked the professor, and Peter didn't know how to answer it exactly.

"But Lucy was only in the closet for a blink of an eye," said Susan, "and if there was such a place in the closet, she never had time to go to it. As soon as we came out of the empty room, she slipped behind us." It was less than a minute before she came out, but she insisted that she had been away for several hours." "Because of this, the story she tells is more likely to be true," said the professor, "if there is really a door in this room that leads to some other world (I remind you, this is a very mysterious building) houses, and even I know very little about them)—even if she does go to another world, then we should not be surprised, that world must have its own concept of time, so no matter how long you stay there, It doesn't take up any time in our world. And I don't think a girl her age can make up a story like this on her own. If she wants to tell a lie, she'll hide a lot of it in it for a while, and then come out and tell her story."

"Sir, do you mean," asked Peter, "that there might be other worlds everywhere in this house, say, in the vicinity?" "It's very possible," said the professor, and as he took off his glasses and wiped them, he said to himself, "I really don't know what these kids are learning at school?" "What are we going to do about it?" Susan said, feeling that the conversation was getting sidetracked. "Boys," said the Professor, looking up at them both with a very serious expression, "there is a plan worth trying, but no one has mentioned it." "What plan?" Susan asked. "Let's leave that alone," he said.That was the end of that conversation.Peter had done much to keep Edmund from laughing at Lucy, and neither she nor anyone else wanted to talk about the wardrobe, which had become an unpleasant subject.So, for a long time, all adventures seemed to be a thing of the past, but they were not. The house of the Professor - of which even he knew little - was so old and so famous that people from all over the country often asked to see it, and it was listed in guidebooks and the like. It is even recorded in the history books, and it is told in various stories, some of which are stranger than the one I am telling you now.Whenever tourists asked to go into the house, the professor always agreed, and Mrs. Macready, the housekeeper, led them around, introducing them to paintings, armor, and the library. Rare books.Mrs. Macready didn't like children very much, and she didn't like interruptions while she was telling her guests all kinds of anecdotes she knew.Almost on the first morning of the children's arrival, she explained to Susan and Peter (along with many other rules): "Please remember that when I show people, you have to stay away .” "As if some of us were going to waste the day with a bunch of grown-ups we don't know," said Edmund.The other three had the same idea.Unexpectedly, the second adventure was caused by this. A few days later, Peter and Edmund were staring at the armor, trying to see if they could take it off, when the two girls suddenly ran into the house and said, "No, Macareti brought a group of people. coming!" "How bad!" said Peter, and the four of them quickly slipped through the door at the other end.After slipping out, they went first into the drawing room, then into the library, when they heard voices in front of them, and they all thought that Mrs. Macready had gone to the back building with the sightseers, and that Did not come to the front building as they expected.Afterwards, they didn't know whether they were in a daze, or Mrs. Macready was coming to arrest them, or the magic power of this house appeared again and wanted to drive them to Narnia. They seemed to feel that someone was following them everywhere. .At last Susan said: "Oh, what a nuisance these tourists are! Well, let's hide in the empty wardrobe room until they're gone, and no one will go there with us." " But as soon as they entered the empty room, they heard someone talking in the corridor, followed by the sound of touching the door, and they saw that the door handle was already moving. "Quick!" said Peter, "there's nowhere else to hide!" and he flung open the cupboard door.The four of them curled up in the dark closet, gasping for breath.Peter closed the cupboard door, but did not close it tightly, because, like every reasonable person, he understood how a man could shut himself in a cupboard.