by Edward Eager
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.
"And midnight canoe rides," said Jane.
"I wish we were sixteen right now, don't you?" said Katharine, trailing one foot in the water.
"Yes," said Jane, trailing one of hers, "I do."
Immediately they were.
Mark felt the change coming just before it happened, and started to cry out, but what could he say? All he could do was watch, horrified, as his sisters' figures lengthened in the middle and their scratched legs grew slim and elegant, and their faces changed from tan and freckled to pink-and-white and powdered and uppity.
"I don't like it! Tell it to stop!" cried Martha, gazing at her expanding sisters in dismay.
"It's that magic," said Mark. "We said not every day, but nobody said anything about the nighttimes!"
Of course, if the magic had chosen to be really mean, it could have made Jane and Katharine grow up, still in their short smocked frocks and circle-combs, and they might have looked like little girls, only stretched, the way Alice did after she ate the cake that said, "Eat me."
But it took pity on their faltering youth and provided suitable dance dresses, one pink and one turquoise. And their straight un-sixteenish hair curled rapidly into a fashionable frizz, cut in the new shingle bob.
"Eek!" said the vision in pink (who seemed to be Katharine), pulling her foot quickly up out of the lake. "What nasty cold water!"
"Paddling with the little ones, how quaint," said the altered Jane.
And the two smartly-dressed flappers hurried to pull on the silken hose and satin slippers the magic had thoughtfully left in place of their cast-off socks and scuffed oxfords.
"Run along, children," said the Jane one. "Go tell your mother she wants you." And she and the Katharine one turned toward the dance floor.
Mark grabbed Martha's hand, and they hurried after them anxiously. The children's mother and Mr. Smith passed, going in the opposite direction.
"Hello, darlings, having fun?" said their mother, not noticing a thing, of course.
But two white-flanneled young men who were lounging near the dance floor seemed to notice Jane and Katharine quite a lot (which proved that they were perhaps not quite such grown-up young men as they thought they were).
One of the young men was dark, with slickum in his hair; the other sported a downy blond mustache. As Jane and Katharine drew near, the blond young man nudged his friend. The dark young man uttered a low whistle.
"I say, Topsfield," said the blond one affectedly. "What say to a spin on the floor with yon fair damsels?"
"Some keen chickens," said the dark one, smoothing his hair.
"Did you hear that?" whispered Jane to Katharine.
"Aren't they awful?" whispered Katharine to Jane. They giggled and preened.
"Dudes! Cake-eaters! Harold Teens!" muttered Mark furiously, in the shadows.
The young men approached. "How about a bit of the giddy whirl?" said the dark one to Jane.
"I don't mind," said Jane, tossing her head for all the world as though she really didn't.
"Shall we join the maddening throng?" said the affected blond one to Katharine.
"Charmed," said Katharine, fluttering her eyelashes.
"Ick!" Mark squirmed in his lurking-place.
"I like the dark one best, don't you? He looks like Rudolph Valentino," Martha whispered in his ear.
"He does not! He looks like a big prune!" growled Mark, savage at this desertion by his one ally.
The orchestra struck up "Three O'Clock in the Morning," and the two enchanted maidens went gliding away in the arms of their youthful cavaliers. Mark didn't know what to do next, but he thought he ought to do something. Some of the dance tickets Mr. Smith had bought were still in his pocket; so he grabbed Martha and shoved two tickets at the ticket taker. A second later they were sliding and hopping about the floor, pretending they were waltzing but really being detectives hot on the trail.
At first Mark couldn't locate either of his grown-up sisters as he tottered and heaved his way through the throng of giddy, whirling figures. At last he saw Katharine and the blond young man. They were dancing cheek-to-cheek! Katharine's eyes were.
closed, and the blond young man was whispering in her ear. Mark was so sickened at the sight that he forgot to lurk, and bumped straight into them.
"Really!" said the blond young man, looking down at him loftily. "What grubby children! I didn't know they allowed babies on the dance floor!"
"Aren't they horrid-looking? I wonder who they could be," said Katharine.
Mark stared at his sister with the open mouth of outrage.
"Shut your mouth; you'll trip and fall in it," said the blond young man, forgetting to be affected and being just a snippy sixteen-year-old.
This made Mark so angry that he squared up to the bigger boy and told him to put up his dukes. But at that moment the eddy of the dance swept Katharine and the blond young man away.
Mark looked around wildly and caught sight of the other young man with Jane. They were just leaving the dance floor. They were going to sit this one out, in the moonlight. Mark had heard of sitting dances out in the moonlight, and he was sure no good would come of it. What if the young man proposed? What if they eloped, and then Jane turned back into a little girl again, right at the altar?
Pulling Martha with him, he gave chase. Outside, Jane and the dark young man were just sitting down on a rustic bench bathed with suitable moonbeams. Mark and Martha crouched behind a handy hemlock, and peered out and listened.
"How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank and all that sort of thing," said the dark young man airily, crossing his legs in a sophisticated manner.
"I adore poetry," said Jane.
The dark young man shifted nearer and made his eyes big and soulful. "The night is yet young," he said, "and romance is in the air."
"Is it?" said Jane in thrilled tones.
"Yes," said the young man, "it is. Listen. I know where I can hire this certain canoe. What say to a cruise on the rolling deep after the last dance?"
"All right," said Jane.
Mark groaned, but nobody heard him, because at that moment the band in the pavilion started playing "Home Sweet Home," and a minute later people began streaming out through the doors.
"Let's go find the others," said Jane, and she started for the pavilion,
followed by the dark young man, followed by Mark and Martha. As the procession neared the entrance, the four children's mother appeared with Mr. Smith. Walking right past Jane as though she didn't see her, she came up to Martha and Mark.
"Oh, there you are," she said. "Come along, it's time for bed."
"What about Jane and Kathie?" said Martha.
"Aren't they with you? They must have gone on ahead, then. Come on."
"In a minute. I have to get something." Mark fidgeted and tried to peer past his mother.
"Have to get what?"
"Something I lost." He could see no sign anywhere now of Jane or Katharine or the young men.
Two more precious minutes were wasted in idle argument before he and Martha could escape. Once out of sight of the unwitting grown-ups, they ran. They ran to the pavilion. It was deserted. Then they ran down by the shore. There was a boathouse and a sign that said, "Canoes for Hire." But the man in charge was unhelpful.
"We don't hire to no kids," he said. "Gwan home." He went in and shut the door.
Mark and Martha ran to the water's edge. Over the lake came the sound of merry voices. Someone was playing a ukulele and singing, "Paddlin' Madeline Home."
"When'll they change back, do you suppose?" said Martha anxiously. "The other magic didn't wear off till sundown; do you suppose at night it won't be till moonset? When is moonset?"
"I don't know," said Mark. He stood hesitant.
"Can't we unwish them?" said Martha.
"No," said Mark, "we can't. That never works. It's against the rules."
"Oh, those old rules again!" said Martha.
"Wait," said Mark. "At least we can be with them and know the worst." And hoping the time would still be ripe, he touched the lake.
Immediately they were with their sisters.
But he had forgotten to put in that they wanted to end up actually in the canoe; so where they found themselves was in the water, right next to it. The sudden cold plunge was quite a shock, and for a minute all Mark could do was splutter and gasp.
From the canoe (which was the extra-long tandem kind) four astonished faces gazed.
"Help! I'm drowning!" cried Martha, who nearly was.