“Now see here, my friends,” said she speaking low: “you know how much John Dolittle has done for the animals—given his whole life up to them, one might say. Well, here is your chance to do something for him. Listen: he got made king of this island against his will, see? And now that he has taken the job on, he feels that he can’t leave it—thinks the Indians won’t be able to get along without him and all that—which is nonsense, as you and I very well know. All right. Then here’s the point: if this snail were only willing to take him and us—and a little baggage—not very much, thirty or forty pieces, say—inside his shell and carry us to England, we feel sure that the Doctor would go; because he’s just crazy to mess about on the floor of the ocean. What’s more this would be his one and only chance of escape from the island. Now it is highly important that the Doctor return to his own country to carry on his proper work which means such a lot to the animals of the world. So what we want you to do is to tell the sea-urchin to tell the starfish to tell the snail to take us in his shell and carry us to Puddleby River. Is that plain?”
“Quite, quite,” said the porpoises. “And we will willingly do our very best to persuade him—for it is, as you say, a perfect shame for the great man to be wasting his time here when he is so much needed by the animals.”
“And don’t let the Doctor know what you’re about,” said Polynesia as they started to move off. “He might balk if he thought we had any hand in it. Get the snail to offer on his own account to take us. See?”
John Dolittle, unaware of anything save the work he was engaged on, was standing knee-deep in the shallow water, helping the snail try out his mended tail to see if it were well enough to travel on. Bumpo and Long Arrow, with Chee-Chee and Jip, were lolling at the foot of a palm a little way up the beach. Polynesia and I now went and joined them.
Half an hour passed.
What success the porpoises had met with, we did not know, till suddenly the Doctor left the snail’s side and came splashing out to us, quite breathless.
“What do you think?” he cried, “while I was talking to the snail just now he offered, of his own accord, to take us all back to England inside his shell. He says he has got to go on a voyage of discovery anyway, to hunt up a new home, now that the Deep Hole is closed. Said it wouldn’t be much out of his way to drop us at Puddleby River, if we cared to come along—Goodness, what a chance! I’d love to go. To examine the floor of the ocean all the way from Brazil to Europe! No man ever did it before. What a glorious trip!—Oh that I had never allowed myself to be made king! Now I must see the chance of a lifetime slip by.”
He turned from us and moved down the sands again to the middle beach, gazing wistfully, longingly out at the snail. There was something peculiarly sad and forlorn about him as he stood there on the lonely, moonlit shore, the crown upon his head, his figure showing sharply black against the glittering sea behind.
Out of the darkness at my elbow Polynesia rose and quietly moved down to his side.
“Now Doctor,” said she in a soft persuasive voice as though she were talking to a wayward child, “you know this king business is not your real work in life. These natives will be able to get along without you—not so well as they do with you of course—but they’ll manage—the same as they did before you came. Nobody can say you haven’t done your duty by them. It was their fault: they made you king. Why not accept the snail’s offer; and just drop everything now, and go? The work you’ll do, the information you’ll carry home, will be of far more value than what you’re doing here.”
“Good friend,” said the Doctor turning to her sadly, “I cannot. They would go back to their old unsanitary ways: bad water, uncooked fish, no drainage, enteric fever and the rest. … No. I must think of their health, their welfare. I began life as a people’s doctor: I seem to have come back to it in the end. I cannot desert them. Later perhaps something will turn up. But I cannot leave them now.”
“That’s where you’re wrong, Doctor,” said she. “Now is when you should go. Nothing will ‘turn up.’ The longer you stay, the harder it will be to leave—Go now. Go tonight.”
“What, steal away without even saying goodbye to them! Why, Polynesia, what a thing to suggest!”
“A fat chance they would give you to say goodbye!” snorted Polynesia growing impatient at last. “I tell you, Doctor, if you go back to that palace tonight, for goodbyes or anything else, you will stay there. Now—this moment—is the time for you to go.”
The truth of the old parrot’s words seemed to be striking home; for the Doctor stood silent a minute, thinking.
“But there are the notebooks,” he said presently: “I would have to go back to fetch them.”
“I have them here, Doctor,” said I, speaking up—“all of them.”
Again he pondered.
“And Long Arrow’s collection,” he said. “I would have to take that also with me.”
“It is here, Oh Kindly One,” came the Indian’s deep voice from the shadow beneath the palm.
“But what about provisions,” asked the Doctor—“food for the journey?”
“We have a week’s supply with us, for our holiday,” said Polynesia—“that’s more than we will need.”
For a
