Magic by the Lake (5 page)

It was with feelings of utter exhaustion that they finally flopped on the cool grass under the hammock late that afternoon. Martha went so far as to withdraw into her shell and announce that she wasn't coming out until conditions improved.

"How long will it last, do you suppose?" said Katharine.

"Till sundown, I guess, if it's like all the books," said Mark, "though this isn't like any book I ever read."

"The shell part's the worst," said Jane. "My middle keeps itching, and I can't get at it to scratch."

At that moment the sun sank redly behind the silver birches, and a few seconds later Katharine smiled with relief at the ordinary, but welcome, face of her older sister. Martha uncurled her head and arms and legs from a very peculiar and uncomfortable-looking position.

"After this," said Mark, "I'm going to feel lots closer to that turtle. Think what it goes through."

"I shouldn't think it would put up with it," said Jane. "I should think it'd go on strike."

"We must be specially kind to it," said Katharine, "when we see it again."

"I wonder when we will," said Martha.

"Dinner," said their mother, from the doorway.

And they went inside.

"The thing is," said Mark, after their morning swim next day, "how often does every so often
come
? We said not every day; so at least today'll be time out."

"That doesn't signify," said Katharine. "We asked it to give us time to rest up, in between, and I'm all rested now."

"Who isn't?" said Jane.

"Me," said Martha, but of course nobody paid any attention to
her.

"The turtle said when we feel like magic we should touch the lake and wish, and if the time is ripe, we'll get it," Mark reminded them.

"Well?" said Jane. "What are we waiting for? Lake, here we come. What does everybody want to wish? Now
I
think," she started to go on.

"If you ask
me
," said Katharine at the same time.

"
My
idea is," said Mark.

A period of utter confusion and rude interrupting followed. But at last Jane and Katharine and Mark decided that being in on the burning of Rome was what would make this morning just about perfect.

Martha said she didn't feel like going anywhere or seeing anything right now, let alone a burning, and anyway their mother had said never to play with fire, and anyway she wasn't going to come. And she started burying herself in the sand, all but her head, "like an ostrich, only backwards," as Katharine said.

"Never mind her. Come on," said Jane. So she and Mark and Katharine went down to the water's edge and touched the lake and wished. They waited, but nothing happened.

"I guess the time's still green," said Katharine.

"Yes," said Mark. "I kind of figured it might be. It stands to reason. We don't want to be greedy."

"We ought to have sort of a timetable, though," said Jane. "Like every third day or something. Something we can depend on. This way's too risky. It'd be just like that magic to sneak up behind us when we least want it."

"Let's find the turtle and ask," said Katharine.

To board the flat-bottomed rowboat was but the work of a moment, and a moment after
that
Jane and Mark and Katharine were cruising round the inlet among the frogs and the lily pads. Turtles were there in abundance on every side, but who was to say which was
their
turtle?

"O turtle?" said Mark experimentally to the nearest one. It took one look at the four children, turned, and swam away as fast as it could.

"Was that him or not?" said Katharine ungrammatically. "I thought ours was more sort of pointy."

"What's the difference?" said Jane. "Let it go. Our turtle said
all
turtles are magic, didn't it? All we need to do is row up near any one of them and wish it would start granting wishes. If we could get two or three of them working for us at once, we could have wishes practically every few minutes!"

"No, that wouldn't be right," said Mark. "It' d be going against the rules, I know it would. It wouldn't be fair."

"Who cares?" said Jane ruthlessly. "We can be the exception that improves the rule." She raised her voice. "I wish," she began.

Immediately there was a plopping sound from all sides as all the turtles in the neighborhood jumped into the water and swam rapidly away before they could hear any more. So that seemed to be that.

"Oh, well," said Mark. "We've still got the lake, magic or not." And Jane and Katharine had to agree.

They tied the boat to a convenient willow tree and went and dug Martha out of the sand and threw her into the shallow water to wash her off. Then they all jumped in after her and had another swim. Then it was time to get dressed for lunch. And after lunch their mother sent them to Cold Springs to get the mail.

Getting the mail was lots more fun at Cold Springs than it ever had been at home, with none of your ordinary mailmen or post office boxes, exciting as these may be at times, like Christmas, for instance.

Cold Springs managed these things much more interestingly.

At exactly one o'clock every day a truck came whizzing up and stopped between the hotel and the dance pavilion. And a hoarse-voiced lady in a red straw hat stood in the back of the truck and cried out the names on the different pieces of mail, and everybody stood around listening, and those whose mail it was spoke up and claimed it.

Today the four children stood up in the crowd and listened admiringly while the hoarse lady shrieked, "Yagerfritz! Spooncraft! Iggleblod!" Or perhaps those weren't quite the names, but that's what they sounded like.

"I wish we'd get an interesting package, don't you?" said Katharine to Martha.

"Don't!" Martha almost screamed. "Suppose the time got to be ripe suddenly and it came true? We might get a ticking one with a bomb inside!"

"I haven't touched the lake, silly," said Katharine.

"You have so," said Martha. "You were lazy and left your bathing suit on under your dress; I saw you. It's still damp, and there's lake water touching you right now."

Katharine looked down. Sure enough, a damp patch showed through her dress at her middle.

At that moment the hoarse lady called out the four children's last name. Everybody gasped. Mark took the package gingerly. But it turned out to be just the extra blue jeans their mother had ordered for him, and all agreed that, while useful, they could hardly be called interesting.

Katharine got a letter from her best friend Edie Eubank, and that was all the mail. Edie was enthralling in her description of life at home during the one day the children had been gone. The Loo Tay Hand Laundry had burned down, and Edie had caught seventeen grasshoppers and put them in a bottle, and she was yours friendly, Edie Eubank. By the time Katharine had finished reading the letter out loud, the four children were back at the cottage.

For the rest of the afternoon they went their several ways. Martha started making a collection of snail shells from the beach, and Katharine caught grasshoppers and put them in a bottle, to be like Edie Eubank, only she was tenderhearted and let them out again every time she had two or three gathered together.

Mark lay in the hammock reading
By Pike and Dike.

Only Jane, ever the most persistent, put her time to good employ by making a list of interesting wishes to be wished. She started with suitably watery things, like diving twenty thousand leagues under the sea and getting caught in a typhoon and crossing the Pacific Ocean in an aeroplane (for few people had done that in those days).

But as the afternoon wore on, she branched out and put down just anything exciting that occurred to her. Pretty soon Mark came over to the summerhouse, where she was sitting, and started reading over her shoulder (and breathing down her neck).

"Besiege a castle. Explore Mars. Be a movie star," he read. And then down at the bottom of the page, "rabbit hole?" written with a question mark after it and then crossed out.

"What's that mean?" he said.

Jane blushed. "Oh, that. That's nothing. That's dumb. When I was little, I always kind of wanted to be a rabbit in a rabbit hole. That's kid stuff, though."

"Sure." Mark was sympathetic. "And if we did it, that would be bound to be the day a fox came hunting round." But all the same it made him feel good about Jane somehow to think that she could have ideas like that, and not just be bold and dashing
all
of the time. "Being otters might not be so bad," he said. "They have lots of fun, sliding down those old slides. It'd be handy to the lake, too."

And then the chug-a-chug of Mr. Smith's car was heard, and Mark ran to open the gate and let him in from the field.

Mr. Smith seemed tired at dinner, as well he might, for driving fifty miles twice a day wasn't so easy back in those earlier days of motoring. He seemed a bit worried, too, and said business at the bookshop hadn't been too good today. But he perked up after dinner and asked whether everybody would like to go up to Cold Springs for a while. For at Cold Springs there was dancing in the pavilion three nights a week, and this was one of the nights.

Even as he spoke, the strains of distant music came wafting down the lake, with that extra haunting beauty that music heard over the water always has, and from that moment on all was spatter and dash as the girls did the dinner dishes and everybody hurried into good clothes and rummaged for extra flashlights. Twenty minutes later the procession started, going single file because the path was narrow.

Walks in the country at night are always mysterious, and land that may be friendly and familiar by day seems suddenly strange and untamed. Tonight their own grove of trees was a haunted forest and their lake a vast unexplored sea, hanging dark and cavernous at their elbow. The silver birches glimmered like ghosts. The four children were glad when they passed a lighted cottage.

But soon there were more lights up ahead, and the noise and bustle of Cold Springs. And the dance orchestra, which had taken time out for Orange Crushes, began playing again, and they entered the pavilion to the triumphant strains of "Tiger Rag."

Mr. Smith bought a whole strip of dance tickets at ten cents each, and he and the children's mother danced. He offered some tickets to the four children, but Mark shuddered at the very thought and quickly lost himself in a crowd that was buying cotton candy, and Jane and Katharine were too proud to dance with each other.

"What are we, mere wallflowers?" said Jane haughtily.

So they and Martha sat and watched the dancers, and pretty soon Mark joined them and treated them all to cotton candy, to make amends.

It was interesting studying the lovely young girls and their white-flanneled escorts and deciding which were the prettiest (or handsomest) and criticizing their dresses and dancing form. At least, it was interesting to Jane and Katharine.

"Cheek-to-cheek!" said Jane, pointing to a couple that was dancing in that picturesque position. "
I
think it's disgusting!"

"Romantic, though," said Katharine dreamily.

Mark uttered a sound of contempt. What interested Mark was a sign prominently displayed on the dance floor. "Shimmy-Sha-Wobble Positively Prohibited," it said. He hoped that pretty soon somebody would do the Shimmy-Sha-Wobble, whatever that might be, and be put off the floor. But nobody did, and he began to yawn, a prey to restlessness.

Martha was openly bored, and went and climbed up on the bandstand and talked to the piano player, and kept asking him to play "Yes, We Have No Bananas," which was the only popular song she knew, until he told her to go away.

But at long last even Jane and Katharine grew weary of merely gazing at the vain pomp and glitter, and the four children wandered on, out to the end of the pavilion, where it projected over the lake. They stood looking at the water plashing alluringly below. Presently Mark climbed over the rail and sat on the edge, and the others followed. They took off their shoes and socks and swung their legs, paddling their toes in the cool wetness (all except Martha, whose legs were too short to reach).

"How old do you suppose you have to be before you can start going to dances
really
?" said Katharine.

"
I
mean to start when I'm sixteen," said Jane.

"I think it's dumb," said Mark. "Pushing each other round an old floor, slub, slub, slub, what's the point?"

"I don't want to be sixteen, ever," said Martha. "I just want to stay the age I am."

"A lot you know!" said Jane. "Why, sixteen' s the beginning of
everything
! It's just the whole crowning point of life, that's all!"

"When Mother was sixteen, she was so popular a whole lot of boys came calling at once, and they all sat in the porch swing, and there were so many they pulled the porch ceiling right
down!
She told me," said Katharine.

"
I
mean to be popular, too," said Jane, with decision. "Only we won't bother with any old porch swings. We'll drive round in sports cars."

"To fraternity house parties," said Katharine, not sure just what these were, but thinking they sounded dashing.