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. Kathleen shows Mabel how to “make a back” and climbs up on it into the cold, stony inside of the monster. Mabel hands up the clothes and the sticks.
Mabel hands up the clothes and the sticks
“There’s lots of room,” says Kathleen; “its tail goes down into the ground. It’s like a secret passage.”
“Suppose something comes out of it and jumps out at you,” says Mabel, and Kathleen hurriedly descends.
The explanations to Mademoiselle promise to be difficult, but, as Kathleen said afterwards, any little thing is enough to take a grown-up’s attention off. A figure passes the window just as they are explaining that it really did look exactly like an uncle that the boys have gone to London with.
“Who’s that?” says Mademoiselle suddenly, pointing, too, which everyone knows is not manners.
It is the bailiff coming back from the doctor’s with antiseptic plaster on that nasty cut that took so long a-bathing this morning. They tell her it is the bailiff at Yalding Towers, and she says. “Sky!” (Ciel!) and asks no more awkward questions about the boys. Lunch—very late—is a silent meal. After lunch Mademoiselle goes out, in a hat with many pink roses, carrying a rose-lined parasol. The girls, in dead silence, organize a dolls’ tea-party, with real tea. At the second cup Kathleen bursts into tears. Mabel, also weeping, embraces her.
“I wish,” sobs Kathleen, “oh, I do wish I knew where the boys were! It would be such a comfort.”
Gerald knew where the boys were, and it was no comfort to him at all. If you come to think of it, he was the only person who could know where they were, because Jimmy didn’t know that he was a boy—and indeed he wasn’t really—and the Ugly-Wugly couldn’t be expected to know anything real, such as where boys were. At the moment when the second cup of dolls’ tea—very strong, but not strong enough to drown care in—was being poured out by the trembling hand of Kathleen, Gerald was lurking—there really is no other word for it—on the staircase of Aldermanbury Buildings, Old Broad Street. On the floor below him was a door bearing the legend “MR. U. W UGLI, Stock and Share Broker. And at the Stock Exchange,” and on the floor above was another door, on which was the name of Gerald’s little brother, now grown suddenly rich in so magic and tragic a way. There were no explaining words under Jimmy’s name. Gerald could not guess what walk in life it was to which That (which had been Jimmy) owed its affluence. He had seen, when the door opened to admit his brother, a tangle of clerks and mahogany desks. Evidently That had a large business.
What was Gerald to do? What could he do?
It is almost impossible, especially for one so young as Gerald, to enter a large London office and explain that the elderly and respected head of it is not what he seems, but is really your little brother, who has been suddenly advanced to age and wealth by a tricky wishing ring. If you think it’s a possible thing, try it, that’s all. Nor could he knock at the door of Mr. U. W Ugli, Stock and Share Broker (and at the Stock Exchange), and inform his clerks that their chief was really nothing but old clothes that had accidentally come alive, and by some magic, which he couldn’t attempt to explain, become real during a night spent at a really good hotel which had no existence.
The situation bristled, as you see, with difficulties. And it was so long past Gerald’s proper dinner-time that his increasing hunger was rapidly growing to seem the most important difficulty of all. It is quite possible to starve to death on the staircase of a London building if the people you are watching for only stay long enough in their offices. The truth of this came home to Gerald more and more painfully.
A boy with hair like a new front door mat came whistling up the stairs. He had a dark blue bag in his hands.
“I’ll give you a tannereh for yourself if you’ll get me a tanner’s worth of buns,” said Gerald, with that prompt decision common to all great commanders.
“Show us yer tanners,” the boy rejoined with at least equal promptness. Gerald showed them. “All right; hand over.”
“Payment on delivery,” said Gerald, using words from the drapers which he had never thought to use.
The boy grinned admiringly.
“Knows ‘is wy abaht,” he said; “ain’t no flies on ’im.”
“Not many,” Gerald owned with modest pride. “Cut along, there’s a good chap. I’ve got to wait here. I’ll take care of your bag if you like.”
“Nor yet there ain’t no flies on me neither,” remarked the boy, shouldering it. “I been up to the confidence trick for years—ever since I was your age.”
With this parting shot he went; and returned in due course bun-laden. Gerald gave the sixpence and took the buns. When the boy, a minute later, emerged from the door of Mr. U. W Ugli, Stock and Share Broker (and at the Stock Exchange), Gerald stopped him.
“What sort of chap’s that?” he asked, pointing the question with a jerk of an explaining thumb.
“Awful big pot,”ei said the boy; “up to his eyes in oof.ej Motor and all that.”
“Know anything about the one on the next landing?”