ebook - C.S. Lewis-The Chronicles Of Narnia, Literatura dla dzieci i młodzieży w języku angielskim
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C.S. Lewis
The Chronicles Of Narnia
THE LION, THE WITCH AND THE WARDROBE
BY
C.S.LEWIS
CHAPTER ONE
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 good night 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 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 blue-bottle 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 worth while 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 moth-balls 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.
CHAPTER TWO
WHAT LUCY FOUND THERE
"GOOD EVENING," said Lucy. But the Faun was so busy picking up its parcels that at
first it did not reply. When it had finished it made her a little bow.
"Good evening, good evening," said the Faun. "Excuse me - I don't want to be inquisitive
- but should I be right in thinking that you are a Daughter of Eve?"
"My name's Lucy," said she, not quite understanding him.
"But you are - forgive me - you are what they call a girl?" said the Faun.
"Of course I'm a girl," said Lucy.
"You are in fact Human?"
"Of course I'm human," said Lucy, still a little puzzled.
"To be sure, to be sure," said the Faun. "How stupid of me! But I've never seen a Son of
Adam or a Daughter of Eve before. I am delighted. That is to say -" and then it stopped as
if it had been going to say something it had not intended but had remembered in time.
"Delighted, delighted," it went on. "Allow me to introduce myself. My name is Tumnus."
"I am very pleased to meet you, Mr Tumnus," said Lucy.
"And may I ask, O Lucy Daughter of Eve," said Mr Tumnus, "how you have come into
Narnia?"
"Narnia? What's that?" said Lucy.
"This is the land of Narnia," said the Faun, "where we are now; all that lies between the
lamp-post and the great castle of Cair Paravel on the eastern sea. And you - you have
come from the wild woods of the west?"
"I - I got in through the wardrobe in the spare room," said Lucy.
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