Magic by the Lake (9 page)

And still clapping each other on the back and rejoicing in their good fortune, they hurried off across the snow.

"Wait!" called Martha after them. The others didn't even bother.

"Really!" said Jane. "Some people!"

"And now I suppose we just go home," said Katharine.

"No, we don't," said Mark. "Not till sundown. Remember?"

Everybody looked at the sun. It shone brightly, straight above them. Time passed. They looked at it again. It hadn't moved an inch and didn't look as if it intended to. And then Mark remembered something.

"Oh-oh," he said. "We're at the South Pole, remember? Didn't you ever hear of the midnight sun? When there
is
any sun at all down here, it hardly
ever
sets. Sometimes not for weeks, I guess."

"And here we are," said Katharine.

"And here we'll be," said Jane.

"I want Mother," said Martha.

After that nobody said anything for a few minutes. "Who wants to throw snowballs?" said Mark finally.

Nobody did.

"Now I know where the snows of yesteryear are," said Katharine. "They're all here. They must be."

"Now I see why people go to Florida in the winter," said Jane. "I for one will never build a snowman again."

Mark cleared his throat. "O turtle?" he said.

"Don't be silly," said Jane. "It couldn't come here. It'd freeze."

"We're here and
we're
not freezing, are we?" said Mark.

"
Who
isn't?" said Martha bitterly.

At that moment a voice spoke at their elbow. "Hello," it said.

The four children turned. An odd figure in nun-like black-and-white confronted them.

"You're a penguin," said Katharine.

"Naturally," said the penguin.

Carrie the cat arched her back and hissed. She could not abide a bird.

"Do you know our turtle? Did it send you to help us? Are penguins magic, too?" said Martha.

"Don't we look as though we were?" said the penguin. And the four children had to admit that this was true.

"Wish us home, then," said Martha.

"Make the sun set," said Katharine.

"Please," said Mark, either because he had better manners than the others or because he was more tactful.

"It's not so simple as that," said the penguin.

"Naturally. It never is," said Jane.

"As you ought to know by now," agreed the penguin. "However. Just sit there patiently for a bit. Perhaps I'll think of something."

The four children sat there patiently while the penguin paced up and down, deep in thought. Carrie the cat followed the penguin with her eyes. She crouched low to the ground, her tail lashing. She started forward.

"Call off this fierce marauding beast," said the penguin. "I can't think when I'm being stalked."

Martha took Carrie in her lap.

"That's better," said the penguin. "Now then. Follow me. I have a plan."

It led the way, and the four children followed, Martha still keeping tight hold of Carrie. Carrie's lip curled in disgust every time she looked at the penguin. Presently they came in sight of an endless-looking windswept sea, with a great mass of ice at its edge.

"That's probably the Antarctic Ocean," said Mark, who knew about such things. "That's probably a glacier just up ahead."

Even as he spoke, there was a crash, and a sizable mass of ice detached itself from the shore and went floating away over the cold, vasty deep.

"Hop on," said the penguin. "The next iceberg leaves in two minutes."

The four children hopped where it pointed and sat down on cold slipperiness that moved. A few seconds later there was another crash, and a crack appeared between them and the penguin. The crack widened rapidly into a watery gulf, and the four children found themselves sailing away in the wake of the previous iceberg.

"Good-bye!" they called, waving at the shore. "Thanks a lot!" The penguin flipped a flipper. Carrie uttered a parting snarl.

And then shore and penguin were lost to view, and there was nothing to be seen on either hand but cold water and other bobbing icebergs.

"Hard-a-lee!" said Jane. "This is as good as being on a yacht. Well, almost."

"My sitting-down part's cold," said Martha. "It's damp, too."

"Do icebergs always go this fast?" said Katharine. "We're passing all those others already. And I think it's getting warmer."

"Isn't it?" said Jane. "That penguin must have sent us by special express. We must be getting up in the Temperate Zone already."

"
I
think we're shrinking," said Martha. "Look!"

Jane and Katharine looked. It was true. The edges of their icy float were visibly melting away before their eyes.

"This is awful," said Jane. "We're down to half-size already. How long do you suppose we'll last?"

Mark said nothing. He was scanning the horizon. Now he suddenly took off his coat and started waving it. "Ship ahoy!" he called.

A ship had appeared on the horizon and was steaming swiftly toward them. Soon it was so near that the four children could see the faces of the people who lined the deck. But the faces didn't seem friendly a bit.

"Keep away!" called the people on the ship. "How dare you run your nasty old iceberg across our course? Don't come any nearer. You'll run us down!"

And the ship turned in craven flight and hurried away, fearful of being rammed and caved in. "Though for all the damage we could do by now," said Jane, "we might as well be a mere popsicle!"

It was true. The iceberg had dwindled away till there was barely room for the four of them and Carrie to sit, huddled together as closely as they could huddle. The four children took off the thick coats the magic had provided in order to make more room (and because it was growing so very hot all of a sudden), and the coats sank to a watery grave as the edges of the iceberg melted away under them.

"Darn!" said Katharine. "I liked mine lots better than my regular winter one."

"Never mind," said Jane. "They'd probably have vanished at sundown, anyway."

"Speaking of sun," said Mark, dashing perspiration from his forehead and beginning to take off his shirt, "this must be the tropics. It's hot!"

"The tropics?" cried Martha in alarm. "You know what they have there, don't you? Sharks!"

Katharine glanced ahead. She turned pale. "Don't look!" she cried; so of course everyone did.

A curved fin was bearing down toward them. No one needed to be told whose fin it was. Martha began to cry.

"Don't give up. Not yet," said Mark grimly. "Look over there."

Everybody looked the other way. The tropical sun, a hot red ball, was sinking toward the blue waves. In its heat the last remnants of the iceberg were dissolving fast. The four children could hear small tinkles and crackings below them now as its underpinnings gave way, and when they looked down, they could see heaving sea through the poor final fragment that was just big enough to bear their weight. It was a race between the iceberg and the sun. The shark could afford to wait. Martha had her hands over her eyes, but she peeked between her fingers and saw the curved fin hovering nearby.

Then the last thin ice melted, and the four children felt themselves sinking. But they didn't plunge into watery saltness, or into sharky, toothy sharpness either. For as the iceberg sank, so did the sun, and the four children landed with a thud on hard, dry flooring.

They were sitting in a circle on the living room floor looking at a dishpan full of water.

Their mother came into the room. "What are you doing in here?" she said. "The storm stopped ages ago. Don't you want to go swimming?"

Mark and Martha and Jane and Katharine rose crampedly to their feet and staggered to fetch their bathing suits. And the mind of each grappled dazedly with the fact that it was still only morning after the long full day they'd already had.

As they came out into the sunlight, a black-and-white towhee was scratching among the weeds near the porch. Thinking it was the penguin grown to handier, convenient size, Carrie hurried away after it.

The four children paid her no heed. The lake was waiting. They ran into it.

When Mr. Smith came home from the bookshop that evening, he brought newspapers with him, and the newspapers had staring headlines. Some American explorers had discovered the South Pole.

"Isn't it exciting?" said the children's mother.

"Oh, that," said Martha.

"It's all right, I guess," said Jane, "if you like that kind of thing."

But as soon as they were alone, the four children read the newspaper accounts through carefully. None of the stories made any mention of Carrie, and they didn't say anything about four ghostly children, either.

"It's not fair," said Jane. "It was our best chance of going down in history, so far. Now I'll have to think of something else."

"I don't mind for myself," said Martha. "It's Carrie. You'd think the least they could do would be name the continent after her!"

"Little Cattia," said Mark.

"Feline Island," said Katharine.

"New Carrie," said Jane.

There was a pause. "Oh, well," said Mark. "At least we'll always know we were a part of it."

"We can feel secretly proud," said Katharine.

"Virtue is its own reward," said Martha.

"It would be," said Jane. "As if it weren't dull enough already! It's adding insult to injury." But she cut the newspaper stories out and put them away in her top bureau drawer just the same.

The reason the four children were alone was that their mother and Mr. Smith were in the upstairs bedroom talking. They talked for a long time, and dinner was late, and after dinner (and dishes) their mother and Mr. Smith kept looking at each other as if they had something on their minds and wanted to be alone with it, and kept asking the four children if they weren't tired and didn't want to go to bed early, until at last the four children saw the point and decided to humor the poor hapless adults, and they
went
to bed. And Jane and Katharine and Martha went to sleep.

Mark went to sleep for a while, but then he woke up. The reason he woke up was that their mother and Mr. Smith had come downstairs from their bedroom for a midnight snack and were sitting in the living room having it. And the light shone in Mark's • eyes on the sleeping porch, and he could hear every word they said.

Of course, he knew perfectly well that eavesdropping is wrong, and he probably should have called out and warned them, but by the time he thought of this he'd already heard so much he decided it would be embarrassing. And besides, he wasn't dropping from the eaves; he was lying obediently in his own bed, and if people
would
come talking right by an open window right next to him, he couldn't help that, could he? And besides, it was interesting.

So he lay low and said nothing. After a while their mother and Mr. Smith put out the living room light and went upstairs. But still Mark lay awake for a long time thinking.

Right after breakfast next morning, before swimming or anything, he called a conference. And because the sight of the lake might prove too tantalizing, when there was nothing they could do about it till day after tomorrow, he called it on the other side of the cottage, the side next to the pasture with the sheep and the unfriendly rams. Jane and Katharine and Martha sat in a row on the split-rail fence and listened, while Mark perched on a boulder and drew patterns in the earth with a stick, as he talked.

"The thing is," he said, "this summer may be all very well for us, and a consolation devoutly to be wished, but it's hard on Mr. Smith," (for he could never bring himself to say Uncle Huge, the way Martha did). "He has to run all this and the bookshop, too. He's having to kind of lead a double life."

"Like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde," said Katharine.

"Only different," said Jane.

"And the thing is," said Mark, "it's beginning to Tell on him. His Business is Suffering. And he's worried about it. I heard him tell Mother so."

"He looks tired, too," said Martha. "All that driving back and forth."

"And it's all our fault," said Katharine. "We've been enjoying the magic, and wasting its sweetness on our own desert air, and never thinking of others at all."

"We've got to do something," said Jane.

"What'll we do?" said Martha.

"That's the whole point," said Mark. "The next wish has got to be for
him.
"

"You're right," said Jane. "It's only fair."

"What'll we wish?" said Martha.

"That's the whole point," said Mark again. "We don't want to rush off half-cocked, the way we did when we tried to help Mother with the half-magic that other time. Remember what happened."

They remembered.

"No," he went on, "this time we've really got to think it over first. And that's why it's good that we've got two whole days before the magic. We can be thinking."

"Good," said Jane. "We'll do that."

"Let's," said Katharine.

Martha nodded her head earnestly.

And with that settled, the four children forgot all about Mr. Smith for the moment and turned their minds happily to the important question of how they were to while away the golden hours in the meantime.