“You mean,” said Bernard, “you feel that it wouldn’t work, so you didn’t try.”
A rattling, ripping sound outside, beginning softly, waxed louder and louder so as almost to drown their voices. It was the drum, and it announced the beginning of the circus. The Spangled Child put his head in and said, “Hurry up or you’ll miss my Infant Prodigious Act on the Horse with the Tambourines,” and took his head out again.
“Oh, dear,” said Mavis, “and we haven’t arranged a single thing about rescuing you.”
“No more you have,” said the Mermaid carelessly.
“Look here,” said Francis, “you do want to be rescued, don’t you?”
“Of course I do,” replied the Mermaid impatiently, “now I know about the llama rope. But I can’t walk even if they’d let me, and you couldn’t carry me. Couldn’t you come at dead of night with a chariot—I could lift myself into it with your aid—then you could drive swiftly hence, and driving into the sea I could drop from the chariot and escape while you swam ashore.”
“I don’t believe we could—any of it,” said Bernard, “let alone swimming ashore with horses and chariots. Why, Pharaoh himself couldn’t do that, you know.” And even Mavis and Francis added helplessly, “I don’t see how we’re to get a chariot,” and “do you think of some other way.”
“I shall await you,” said the lady in the tank with perfect calmness, “at dead of night.”
With that she twisted the seaweed closely around her head and shoulders and sank slowly to the bottom of the tank. And the children were left staring blankly at each other, while in the circus tent music sounded and the soft heavy pad-pad of hoofs on sawdust.
“What shall we do?” Francis broke the silence.
“Go and see the circus, of course,” said Bernard.
“Of course we can talk about the chariot afterward,” Mavis admitted.
“There’ll be lots of time to talk between now and dead of night,” said Kathleen. “Come on, Bear.”
And they went.
There is nothing like a circus for making you forget your anxieties. It is impossible to dwell on your troubles and difficulties when performing dogs are displaying their accomplishments, and wolves dancing their celebrated dance with the flags of all nations, and the engaging lady who jumps through the paper hoops and comes down miraculously on the flat back of the white horse, cannot but drive dull care away, especially from the minds of the young. So that for an hour and a half—it really was a good circus, and I can’t think how it happened to be at Beachfield Fair at all—a solid slab of breathless enjoyment was wedged in between the interview with the Mermaid and the difficult task of procuring for her the chariot she wanted. But when it was all over and they were part of a hot, tightly packed crowd pouring out of the dusty tent into the sunshine, their responsibilities came upon them with renewed force.
“Wasn’t the clown ripping?” said Bernard, as they got free of the crowd.
“I liked the riding-habit lady best, and the horse that went like that, best,” said Kathleen, trying with small pale hands and brown shod legs to give an example of a horse’s conduct during an exhibition of the haute école.
“Didn’t you think the elephant—” Mavis was beginning, when Francis interrupted her.
“About that chariot,” he said, and after that they talked of nothing else. And whatever they said it always came to this in the end, that they hadn’t got a chariot, and couldn’t get a chariot, and that anyhow they didn’t suppose there was a chariot to be got, at any rate in Beachfield.
“It wouldn’t be any good, I suppose,” said Kathleen’s last and most helpful suggestion—“be the slightest good saying ‘Sabrina fair’ to a pumpkin?”
“We haven’t got even a pumpkin,” Bernard reminded her, “let alone the rats and mice and lizards that Cinderella had. No, that’s no good. But I’ll tell you what.” He stopped short. They were near home now—it was late afternoon, in the road where the talkative yellowhammer lived. “What about a wheelbarrow?”
“Not big enough,” said Francis.
“There’s an extra big one in the mill,” said Bernard. “Now, look here. I’m not any good at magic. But Uncle Tom said I was a born general. If I tell you exactly what to do, will you two do it, and let Cathay and me off going?”
“Going to sneak out of it?” Francis asked bitterly.
“It isn’t. It’s not my game at all, and I don’t want to play. And if I do, the whole thing will be muffed—you know it will. I’m so unlucky. You’d never get out at dead of night without me dropping a boot on the stairs or sneezing—you know you wouldn’t.”
Bernard took a sort of melancholy pride in being the kind of boy who always gets caught. If you are that sort of boy, perhaps that’s the best way to take it. And Francis could not deny that there was something in what he said. He went on: “Then Kathleen’s my special sister and I’m not going to have her dragged into a row.” (“I want to,” Kathleen put in ungratefully.) “So will you and Mavis do it on your own or not?”
After some discussion, in which Kathleen was tactfully dealt with, it was agreed that they would. Then Bernard unfolded his plan of campaign.
“Directly we get home,” he said, “we’ll begin larking about with that old wheelbarrow—giving each other rides, and so on, and when it’s time to go in we’ll leave it at the far end of the field behind the old sheep hut near the gate. Then it’ll be handy for you at dead of night. You must take towels or something and tie around the wheel so that it doesn’t make a row. You can sleep with my toy alarm under your pillow and it won’t wake anyone but you. You get out through the dining room window and in the same way.
