looking at her crossly through his spectacles, “I am sorry you have not been better brought up.” And he walked stiffly towards the Ugly-Wugly. Two hats were raised, a few words were exchanged, and two elderly figures walked side by side down the green pine-walk, followed by three miserable children, horrified, bewildered, alarmed, and, what is really worse than anything, quite at their wits’ end.
“He wished to be rich, so of course he is,” said Gerald; “he’ll have money for tickets and everything.”
“And when the spell breaks—it’s sure to break, isn’t it?—he’ll find himself somewhere awful—perhaps in a really good hotel—and not know how he got there.”
“I wonder how long the Ugly-Wuglies lasted,” said Mabel.
“Yes,” Gerald answered, “that reminds me. You two must collect the coats and things. Hide them, anywhere you like, and we’ll carry them home tomorrow—if there is any tomorrow,” he added darkly.
“Oh, don’t!” said Kathleen, once more breathing heavily on the verge of tears: “you wouldn’t think everything could be so awful, and the sun shining like it does.”
“Look here,” said Gerald, “of course I must stick to Jimmy You two must go home to Mademoiselle and tell her Jimmy and I have gone off in the train with a gentleman—say he looked like an uncle. He does—some kind of uncle. There’ll be a beastly row afterwards, but it’s got to be done.”
“It all seems thick with lies,” said Kathleen; “you don’t seem to be able to get a word of truth in edgewise hardly.”
“Don’t you worry,” said her brother; “they aren’t lies—they’re as true as anything else in this magic rot we’ve got mixed up in. It’s like telling lies in a dream; you can’t help it.”
“Well, all I know is I wish it would stop.”
“Lot of use your wishing that is,” said Gerald, exasperated. “So long. I’ve got to go, and you’ve got to stay. If it’s any comfort to you, I don’t believe any of it’s real: it can’t be; it’s too thick. Tell Mademoiselle Jimmy and I will be back to tea. If we don’t happen to be I can’t help it. I can’t help anything, except perhaps Jimmy.” He started to run, for the girls had lagged, and the Ugly-Wugly and That (late Jimmy) had quickened their pace.
The girls were left looking after them.
“We’ve got to find these clothes,” said Mabel, “simply got to. I used to want to be a heroine. It’s different when it really comes to being, isn’t it?”
“Yes, very,” said Kathleen. “Where shall we hide the clothes when we’ve got them? Not—not that passage?”
“Never!” said Mabel firmly; “we’ll hide them inside the great stone dinosaurus. He’s hollow.”
“He comes alive—in his stone,” said Kathleen.
“Not in the sunshine he doesn’t,” Mabel told her confidently, “and not without the ring.”
“There won’t be any apples and books today,” said Kathleen.
“No, but we’ll do the babiest thing we can do the minute we get home. We’ll have a dolls’ tea-party. That’ll make us feel as if there wasn’t really any magic.”
“It’ll have to be a very strong tea party, then,” said Kathleen doubtfully.
And now we see Gerald, a small but quite determined figure, paddling along in the soft white dust of the sunny road, in the wake of two elderly gentlemen. His hand, in his trousers pocket, buries itself with a feeling of satisfaction in the heavy mixed coinage that is his share of the profits of his conjuring at the fair. His noiseless tennis-shoes bear him to the station, where, unobserved, he listens at the ticket office to the voice of That-which-was-James. “One first London,” it says and Gerald, waiting till That and the Ugly-Wugly have strolled on to the platform, politely conversing of politics and the Kaffir market,eg takes a third return to London. The train strides in, squeaking and puffing. The watched take their seats in a carriage blue-lined. The watcher springs into a yellow wooden compartment. A whistle sounds, a flag is waved. The train pulls itself together, strains, jerks, and starts.
“I don’t understand,” says Gerald, alone in his third-class carriage, “how railway trains and magic can go on at the same time.”
And yet they do.
Mabel and Kathleen, nervously peering among the rhododendron bushes and the bracken and the fancy fir-trees, find six several heaps of coats, hats, skirts, gloves, golf-clubs, hockey-sticks, broom-handles. They carry them, panting and damp, for the mid-day sun is pitiless, up the hill to where the stone dinosaurus looms immense among a forest of larches. The dinosaurus has a hole in his stomach.