“You take Geppe and give it to me,” suggested Rosa; “I will now hold it for a little.”
Their burdens exchanged, they began to mop their faces—it was growing exceedingly hot.
At Hammersmith Broadway the crowd was enormous, and most of it was waiting for the bus to Kew Gardens.
“You had better carry Geppe,” said Rosa to Mario; “I fear that he may get lost.”
Geppe objected, beginning to cry: “I want to walk with Gian-Luca!”
As his father picked him up, he beat with his heels: “Put me down, put me down, I tell you!”
Rosa dragged Berta along by the hand, while Gian-Luca struggled with the hamper.
“No more room on top!” yelled the harassed conductor. “Inside only, please.”
By dint of superhuman exertion, they managed at last to get in.
“Now then, young ’un, don’t gouge out my eyes with that basket!” protested a voice to Gian-Luca.
There were several other children on the knees of their parents, all fretful and on the verge of tears.
“It’s this terrible ’eat,” said a mother to Rosa; “it do try ’em, don’t it, the ’eat?”
The smell in the bus suggested that it did—the sun was blazing through the windows.
“Phew! Ain’t it awful!” a lady complained, clinking her black jet bugles.
Berta sat scratching her nettle-rash, and Geppe’s nose required attention. Gian-Luca peered over the top of the hamper, his collar was feeling rather tight.
“May I undo my collar?” he whispered to Rosa.
But Rosa shook her head: “No, no, caro, you look so nice as you are; you cannot undo your collar.”
He subsided behind the hamper again, so as not to see Berta who was making him itch. He wished that Mario would observe Geppe’s nose—it really did require blowing. Rosa’s fringe had begun to come out of curl—Gian-Luca noticed that too—one long, black strand was gradually uncoiling; very soon it would be in her eye. Her hat—last summer’s—looked rather jaded, the roses no longer very red; however, by contrast, Berta’s headgear was a triumph; a yellow poke bonnet trimmed with cornflowers and daisies and tied under the chin with white ribbon. Berta’s hair stuck out in a bush behind; her eyes stared, inquisitive and greedy. “I am hungry,” she was saying; “how long does it take?”
“We are nearly there,” consoled Rosa.
III
Kew Gardens lay like a jewel in the sun, the grass green and gleaming as an emerald.
“Ma guarda, guarda!” cried Mario in delight; “have we walked into Paradise?”
Gian-Luca paused to examine a magnolia that grew just inside the gate.
“Come on!” ordered Mario; “we have very much to see; we cannot waste time, we must hurry!” He was walking a little lopsidedly now, by reason of the hamper that he had taken from Gian-Luca. His boater straw hat had slipped back on his head, his shoulders were hunched with effort.
They passed a hothouse and a small museum. “Those are for later,” said Mario; “I think now we will make for the large museum; that is of interest, I remember.”
On the way Geppe spied some enticing-looking ducks, swimming on an artificial lake.
“Come on! Come on!” called Mario, sharply; “we have no time to play with ducks.”
The museum was stuffy and very dull, two cases only were amusing. These stood by the door; they contained little people—natives with carts and oxen. The children stopped in delight before them.
“What funny clothes!” remarked Berta.
Gian-Luca agreed.
“Oh, look, oxen!” piped Geppe, blurring the glass with his breath.
“Come, piccini!” came Mario’s voice in the distance. “Come, Rosa, there are two more floors.”
They turned reluctantly to follow the voice, which seemed always to soar on just ahead. At the foot of the stairs they caught it up.
“I think I will stay here,” said Rosa.
“As you please,” Mario smiled; “but we will see all. Come, children, come on, Gian-Luca!” And he and the children disappeared up the stairs, leaving Rosa to wait at the bottom.
The tour of the museum completed at last, Mario bethought him of luncheon. “I think we might go to the Pagoda,” he suggested; “do I not see its top across there?”
“It is such a long way off, and already it is late,” complained Rosa; “let us find a place nearer.”
In the end they sat down in the shade of a wood. It was only a small imitation wood, an incongruous and rather pathetic thing, trying to look wild and romantic and careless, a few hundred yards from a hothouse. However, there were beech trees and many sanguine birds—there were also bluebells in the grass.
“Look, Mario, are they not lovely?” exclaimed Rosa.
But Mario’s gaze was very far away. “We ought to have gone to that Pagoda—” he said slowly, “I can see it over there against the sky.”
Gian-Luca was staring intently at the bluebells; he stooped and touched them with his finger. They were cool and fine as though wrought in wax, their heads bent sideways a little. Something in the blueness and coolness of them reminded him of his pictures—the pictures that never came to him now when he lay between sleeping and waking—but something in this blueness and coolness made him sad, not happy like things seen in his pictures. He resented this sadness; he frowned at the bluebells and suddenly pushed them with his foot.
“Have I not got myself?” thought Gian-Luca; then wondered what that could have to do with bluebells.
Rosa was unpacking the luncheon-basket and Mario was opening a bottle of wine. Berta and Geppe were trying to quarrel, but they could not settle down to it, their attention kept on wandering in the direction of the food.
Gian-Luca accepted a large hunk of pie, and began to forget his depression; for after all, at eleven years old, many mysteries—like bluebells and sudden sadness and belonging to one’s self—seem much less disturbing once the cry of the stomach is appeased.
“Madonna! What excellent
