‘But of course it was all a cruel hoax. They kept on luring my father towards his Kingdom. He liked them less the more he saw of them and my mother soon saw through it. They crossed the sea in a miserable ship with horses, elephants, tigers, lions and monkeys, and arrived in the end at a place called Bristol. By that time my parents were learning English. My mother was very quick. Soon she could understand what they said to each other as well as what they said to her. My father was a simple, easy man. He believed everything he was told. When they explained to him what he was to wear and do to be a proper King at his public acclamation, he learned it all very carefully. It was to take place in a very big green and yellow tent. They told him the ceremony had to take place for seven nights in every city of his Kingdom. My father walked about very proudly, wearing his turban and peacock’s feather, bowing and blowing kisses as he had been taught. He promised my mother they would go home again when it was all over, because kings and queens could do whatever they liked.’
Terak paused for effect.
‘But it was a Circus, and they laughed at him.’
He looked at Ida, Oskar and Ping to see the result of this pronouncement. Their faces were keen and polite, but not struck wild-eyed with horror.
‘My mother says it is the cruellest thing there is. He died of their laughter.’ Again he looked from one to the other, expecting groans.
‘How?’ asked Ping simply.
‘It was this way. On the first night when everybody was screeching and laughing, and the circus master had come on in his smart tight trousers and scarlet riding coat and cocked hat, and his whip, my father lost his temper. He snatched the circus master up and put him across his knees and walloped him till the stool he was sitting on gave way. Then he chased the midget clowns with the whip, and they ran in every direction, tripping up and bolting between his legs. And the one he wanted most to beat ran up the ladder to the tight-rope and took refuge on that. But he trod on the sausages dangling out of his pocket and slipped, hanging on to the rope with hands and knees. Then my father swarmed up the main tent-pole and started along the tight-rope too angry to think, and everybody shrieked with laughter still. And the rope broke and my father fell and broke his neck. But the clown clung to his end of the rope and swung down safely, and it looked as if he was climbing down his sausages. But when my poor mother ran in with her bagpipes under her arm – for she was afraid of losing them – and saw that he was dead, she was so heartbroken, she sat down in the middle and played the bagpipes most desolately. And the crowds laughed more and more. Then clowns ran back and cleared everything away, including the carpet and Father, and the next thing was the lions and lion-tamer. While they were in the ring, my mother took me and ran away. She crossed the river at low tide and went and hid in the green mountains, where there were sheep. We lived there in a real cave. We have been hiding ever since; because it is a very dreadful thing to be laughed at. Very dreadful indeed. Sometimes I try to imagine it when Mother has been scolding me. But I can’t imagine it dreadful enough.’
‘What did your father have to do in the ring that made him suddenly so angry?’ asked Ping.
‘He came in blowing kisses to the people, and called for the royal barber to shave him for his coronation. Crowds of midget clowns ran before him and after him, getting under his feet, spreading red carpets for him that they pulled away just as he stepped on them, and doing a great many rude things that only happen in circuses. For instance, a midget clown came in pulling a giant chamber-pot along after him by a rope. That was very rude. But they called him Majesty all the time, and when at last he was seated on his throne, the barber came. He was the smallest of the clowns and the one my father hated most. He wore a white apron and had his hair curled like a baby’s top-knot, with a comb stuck in it. He had a pair of hedge clippers to cut my father’s hair. Of course he couldn’t reach so he went trotting off on his busy little legs to fetch a step-ladder, but that was still not high enough. It only came to my father’s chest. So the clown could not reach his head, but he cut the hair on my father’s chest instead, like someone clipping grass.’
At this point Ping opened his mouth and let out a charming sound rather like the notes of a chaffinch.
Terak looked at him in astonishment. ‘What was that?’ he said. ‘What were you doing?’
The children were frightened and sorry. They all wanted to laugh, but held tight and said nothing.
‘It was nice,’ said Terak. ‘Do it again, Ping.’ He grinned in expectation.
Then Ping laughed again, and the others could not help it. They laughed too. Terak gave a couple of hicks like someone who does not know what comes next.
‘I’m afraid we’re laughing,’ said Ida, wiping her eyes. ‘I’m awfully sorry.’
‘Laughing? But it didn’t hurt me at all. It was nice.’
‘Yes,’ said Oskar, wiping his eyes too.
‘Laughing! Is that all it is?’ And Terak began to laugh too, wildly, with more breath than he had got. ‘Oh! Oh!’ he cried, clutching his ribs. ‘It hurts now. Oh! Oh! I shall die of it. Ooooh.’ He sat up at last and fetched out a handkerchief to wipe his eyes.
‘Well I never,’ he said. ‘Fancy that. Let’s do it again.’
‘Something has to be funny first,’ said Ping. Terak looked at him with adoration.
‘I think I’d like to be a clown,’ he said.
Ida picked something up out of the grass.
‘This rolled out of your pocket when you pulled out your handkerchief. What is it? It looks like an ivory carving of four women.’
‘Oh that! It’s my tooth. I had toothache and Mother pulled it out. She tied it by a string to the lowest sail of the windmill, then she took hold of the highest sail and jerked that down. It was easy. Would you like it for a keepsake, Ping?’
Ping accepted it with proper courtesy, but before he had finished his sentence, Terak, who was kneeling, bent forward and hid his face and hands in the grass, turning himself into a mere mound that could be sacks of carrots, or compost, or whatever one expects to see in the country. And the reason for this manoeuvre came into sight. A large and businesslike launch painted with official letters and numbers came down the middle of the stream. Several men were on board looking very alert with field-glasses and a megaphone and a lifebuoy tied to coils of rope. They spotted the canoe first with great excitement, and then the children. The skipper bawled ‘Hullo there!’ through the megaphone, a magnified intrusion most unwelcome to the children.
‘Hullo there! Are you all right?’
‘Yes, thank you.’ Their voices sounded as squeaky as young swallows by contrast, and they waved out of politeness.
‘Is the canoe damaged?’
‘No, thank you.’
But already two men were climbing overboard in thigh waders and splashing across the flooded field.
‘I suppose you’re the lot we’re looking for,’ one of them said as they drew nearer. ‘Three kids in a canoe who shot under the bridge at Wigglesoke at about twelve o’clock? We’re the search party,’ he added with a grin. ‘Lucky you didn’t get out into the Wash. Tide’s running out strongly there. What a trio of innocents! Didn’t you know any better than that? However, it looks as though we shan’t need you, Doctor,’ he said to his companion. ‘Unless it’s to certify them as idiots. Come on now. We’ll give you a lift home and tow the canoe. Where do you come from?’
‘Green Knowe, near Penny Sokey.’
‘It’ll take us longer to get back than it took you to come. We’ll telephone from the first pub and tell your people what we think of you.’
The children were in a confusion of mixed feelings, they were abashed at being thought so silly, they were delighted at the prospect of the launch, and unwilling to leave Terak, especially without saying good-bye. Ping solved this difficulty by running over Terak’s back from collar to seat and jumping down over his heels, as any child does to any challenging mound or boulder. Ida and Oskar followed, and the two men saw nothin
g but children behaving like children.
‘Get in,’ they said; and towed the canoe by its mooring rope to the great humiliation of the three sitting in it. ‘Don’t want you carried off downstream again.’ As they neared the launch which was moored to a tree by the main channel, the children looked back for a last glimpse of Terak. There he was, boldly visible, cupping his hands round his mouth to shout: ‘I’m going to be a clown.’
‘Listen to that cow,’ said the Skipper. ‘In the worst flood I’ve known them get stuck in trees. But judging by the noise I should think that one’s only separated from its herd. They’re like women – can’t bear to be alone.’
When the children were pulled on board the launch, they thought of nothing but the glory and power of the return journey, perched up on the top deck and moving, with all the vigour of the engine beneath them, steadily upstream. They bit into their sandwiches with happy teeth, and the men made them hot cocoa and teased them about their reckless canoemanship in a way that left them feeling they were not too bad.
They took a much longer route because the launch could not pass under the stone bridge at Wigglesoke. When they arrived home Miss Sybilla was certainly flustered, but it was difficult to tell whether it was because it had been given out on the one o’clock news that three children were at large on the flood, or whether it was because for some reason the cream would not whip up. Maud Biggin was not upset at all.
‘Hullo, Ham, Shem and Japhet!’ was all she said, and thanked the rescue party politely but casually, as if they had brought back the cat.
‘Children have nine lives,’ she said, ‘and if Ida takes after her aunt she’s got ten.’ Even when the men told her that she would receive a bill later for the expenses of the rescue party, she only said: ‘Well, all experience has to be paid for, and a triple funeral would have cost much more.’
‘Maud! How can you say such things!’ Miss Sybilla twisted the string of her melon beads round her hands so that it broke and all the pips shot down inside her clothes. ‘Oh!’ she said, hurrying out of the room.
Dr Maud grinned at Ida. ‘I hope your voyage of discovery discovered something. They don’t always, you know.’
Ida felt at that moment particularly fond of her aunt. It was dreadful not to be able to tell her that they had discovered what would interest her more than anything on earth. She opened her mouth and shut it again tightly. Oskar had promised silence for all of them.
‘Come on, don’t look so miserable, all of you,’ Dr Maud went on. ‘I should have thought you’d had a first-class adventure and nobody any the worse.’
*
UP IN THE ATTIC the children faced each other guiltily.
‘It does seem a shame not to tell her. I’m sure she dreams about giants every night,’ said Ida. ‘If the Committee gave her some money she could take Terak’s mother back to her mountains and be shown the caves and the giants still living in them.’
‘I promised,’ said Oskar. ‘And a promise to a Displaced Person is the most solemn promise of all.’
‘But Terak’s mother wants to go back.’
‘You don’t understand,’ said Ping. ‘They don’t send Displaced Persons home. They put them in camps. They might even put them in the Zoo.’
‘Without telling Aunt Maud anything about Terak, couldn’t we show her the tooth? It would prove one giant.’
‘She’d enjoy it much more if she found it herself,’ said Ping. ‘And we wouldn’t have to tell any lies. Where could we put it for her to find?’
‘On the gravel path where she always walks up and down thinking out her book.’
‘Yes! Since the new gravel was spread there she can’t take her eyes off it. She is always hoping, I don’t know what for. She must find the tooth before the meeting tomorrow, then she can tell them all.’
Three pairs of sand shoes pattered and skipped down the steep wooden staircase, only noticed by Dr Biggin as a sound of gaiety and by Sybilla Bun as a sound of healthy appetites.
The children crossed the garden as if they were going to mark the fall of the floods. They drew a deep line in blue pencil on the bark of an ash tree at water-level. Anybody could see their only interest was the river. On the way back along the gravel path, Ping stooped to pick up a woolly bear, and the tooth was planted. Anybody could see that he had found something that interested three naturalists. They withdrew to their attic, and there, two went on with the map while the other kept watch at the window. The full length of the roll of lining paper was not enough for their day’s travel. They could only put an arrow with the direction: ‘To Terak’s Windmill.’
‘Is she there yet?’ the artists on their knees on the floor asked from time to time.
‘No, not yet. She ought to have a lot to think about for tomorrow. Why doesn’t she come? Bother, here’s a caller. What shall we do if someone else picks it up first?’
The caller, however, went along the path looking only at the house, noticing its ark-like shape and the cluster of heads like the monkeys usually painted on the attic windows of Noah’s Arks. At the window of the second storey a giraffe’s face should have been seen. He asked for Mrs Oldknow, to whom the house belonged, but she of course was away. Very soon the children saw him retrace his steps looking to left and right, but never on the ground. The iron gate clicked as he latched it and his footfalls along the river path made a kind of clock, to tick-tock away at least five minutes of the children’s suspense. Soon the gate clicked again. Seldom, they thought, had the little gravel path had so much traffic. This time it was a neighbour come to ask if the children who had been lost were all right. With anguish they saw her stop halfway down the path and stoop to the ground. It was only to retie a shoe lace, and on she went, thinking perhaps of washing machines.
‘She pushed it with her toe,’ said Ping. ‘After all, it’s big. I can see it from here.’
‘Perhaps it’s too big to be seen,’ said Oskar, ‘like Terak himself. Perhaps you should have buried it so that only one prong stuck out.’
‘Too late now. Here she comes.’
Dr Maud Biggin came out to take the air. As usual, she walked along the gravel path, bending forward, her hands clasped behind her, humming a tuneless sound and shuffling the loose surface absent-mindedly as she paused to undo a knot of thought. Sometimes she even, surprisingly for a woman of her age, dribbled one of the rounder stones in little kicks before her for the length of the path. After passing over the tooth no less than six times while the children held their breath and tried to will her to see it, Dr Maud at the seventh time kicked it sharply. It did not roll, but sprang and turned somersaults as if determined with its four molar legs to attract her attention with odd acrobatics. She merely followed it up and kicked it again.
Ida groaned. ‘She must be thinking horribly hard. Suppose she kicks it into the river.’
But at the gate Dr Maud turned, as usual, and still spasmodically sending the tooth before her, advanced towards the house. The children, forgetting that they must not seem to expect anything, stood at the open window above her. Ping’s face was inscrutable. Ida was trembling, and Oskar had his fiercest will-power stare. Dr Maud suffered a sort of spasm of thought. She unlocked her hands from behind her, slapped at the midges on her arms and legs, and as if something was now quite clear in her mind set off at twice the pace towards the house and her desk. And she came to the tooth lying where she had kicked it, she as good as passed it – stopped dead, frozen into the bent position that was habitual to her, and stared at it.
‘Eh! What! No!’ she ejaculated picking it up and turning it over. She wiped her spectacles and looked at it again. Her hand trembled. ‘No!’ The children had the reward of seeing her look as surprised as people are supposed to look on arriving in heaven.
A little later, when they and Miss Sybilla were ready for supper, Dr Maud came in wearing the crash helmet that sat so incongruously on her studious head. She looked purposeful and secretive, almost guilty.
‘Maud! It’s su
pper time. Where are you going?’
‘Sorry, Sybilla. Something has turned up – yes – umhum – umhum, has come to my notice, that I must have Dr Odmolar’s advice about before tomorrow. Very odd. Very odd indeed. Very interesting. I wish there was more time before the meeting to examine the situation. No time for supper.’ Off she went hurrying as if she had nearly tripped up and had to catch up with her balance. The silent supper party heard her motor-cycle kicked into action and pop-popping away down the drive.
*
AT BREAKFAST NEXT morning, which was the day of the great meeting, Dr Maud was almost unrecognizable with excitement. Her eyes darted here and there and she looked ready to defy the world. So distant were her thoughts that she ate as people eat alone, with a bulging cheek and uninhibited swallowing noises, until Miss Sybilla said:
‘Maud! Maud, dear! What are you thinking of today. You are not yourself.’
‘Ten times myself today, Sybilla. Today I’m going to make archaeological history. Today I’m going to throw a bomb that will rock the Society.’ She pushed away her unfinished plate.
‘Maud, dear! Eat your grilled tomatoes while they are hot. They cool in a minute.’
‘Grilled tomatoes! Is that all you can think about? Look at the children.’ She looked from one to the other and met three pairs of eyes fixed on her with brilliant expectation and sympathy. ‘Look at the children – even they realize that some things are important. Ida! Are you taking your paradurra abyssiniensis regularly?’
‘Yes, Aunt Maud.’
‘Good girl. Now help Sybilla to carry the chairs and get things ready, and then make yourselves scarce.’
*
THE RIVER HAD GONE down better than could have been expected in one night. It was back within its banks, running strongly but without those wanton waltzing dimples that the children knew now as danger signals. The canoe had been left at a boatbuilder’s on the way home yesterday, because it had sprung a leak in dragging across a submerged strand of barbed wire at the edge of Terak’s meadow. The boatbuilder had hired them a punt until the canoe could be repaired. After the light balance of the canoe it seemed as steady as a liner.
The Children of Green Knowe Collection Page 19