Twelve Stories and a Dream (5 page)

"Dear heart! NO!" and the shopman swept the little men back again, shut
the lid, waved the box in the air, and there it was, in brown paper,
tied up and—WITH GIP'S FULL NAME AND ADDRESS ON THE PAPER!

The shopman laughed at my amazement.

"This is the genuine magic," he said. "The real thing."

"It's a little too genuine for my taste," I said again.

After that he fell to showing Gip tricks, odd tricks, and still odder
the way they were done. He explained them, he turned them inside out,
and there was the dear little chap nodding his busy bit of a head in the
sagest manner.

I did not attend as well as I might. "Hey, presto!" said the Magic
Shopman, and then would come the clear, small "Hey, presto!" of the boy.
But I was distracted by other things. It was being borne in upon me just
how tremendously rum this place was; it was, so to speak, inundated by
a sense of rumness. There was something a little rum about the fixtures
even, about the ceiling, about the floor, about the casually distributed
chairs. I had a queer feeling that whenever I wasn't looking at them
straight they went askew, and moved about, and played a noiseless
puss-in-the-corner behind my back. And the cornice had a serpentine
design with masks—masks altogether too expressive for proper plaster.

Then abruptly my attention was caught by one of the odd-looking
assistants. He was some way off and evidently unaware of my presence—I
saw a sort of three-quarter length of him over a pile of toys and
through an arch—and, you know, he was leaning against a pillar in an
idle sort of way doing the most horrid things with his features! The
particular horrid thing he did was with his nose. He did it just as
though he was idle and wanted to amuse himself. First of all it was a
short, blobby nose, and then suddenly he shot it out like a telescope,
and then out it flew and became thinner and thinner until it was like
a long, red, flexible whip. Like a thing in a nightmare it was! He
flourished it about and flung it forth as a fly-fisher flings his line.

My instant thought was that Gip mustn't see him. I turned about, and
there was Gip quite preoccupied with the shopman, and thinking no evil.
They were whispering together and looking at me. Gip was standing on
a little stool, and the shopman was holding a sort of big drum in his
hand.

"Hide and seek, dadda!" cried Gip. "You're He!"

And before I could do anything to prevent it, the shopman had clapped
the big drum over him. I saw what was up directly. "Take that off," I
cried, "this instant! You'll frighten the boy. Take it off!"

The shopman with the unequal ears did so without a word, and held the
big cylinder towards me to show its emptiness. And the little stool was
vacant! In that instant my boy had utterly disappeared?...

You know, perhaps, that sinister something that comes like a hand out
of the unseen and grips your heart about. You know it takes your common
self away and leaves you tense and deliberate, neither slow nor hasty,
neither angry nor afraid. So it was with me.

I came up to this grinning shopman and kicked his stool aside.

"Stop this folly!" I said. "Where is my boy?"

"You see," he said, still displaying the drum's interior, "there is no
deception—"

I put out my hand to grip him, and he eluded me by a dexterous movement.
I snatched again, and he turned from me and pushed open a door to
escape. "Stop!" I said, and he laughed, receding. I leapt after
him—into utter darkness.

THUD!

"Lor' bless my 'eart! I didn't see you coming, sir!"

I was in Regent Street, and I had collided with a decent-looking working
man; and a yard away, perhaps, and looking a little perplexed with
himself, was Gip. There was some sort of apology, and then Gip had
turned and come to me with a bright little smile, as though for a moment
he had missed me.

And he was carrying four parcels in his arm!

He secured immediate possession of my finger.

For the second I was rather at a loss. I stared round to see the door
of the magic shop, and, behold, it was not there! There was no door, no
shop, nothing, only the common pilaster between the shop where they sell
pictures and the window with the chicks!...

I did the only thing possible in that mental tumult; I walked straight
to the kerbstone and held up my umbrella for a cab.

"'Ansoms," said Gip, in a note of culminating exultation.

I helped him in, recalled my address with an effort, and got in also.
Something unusual proclaimed itself in my tail-coat pocket, and I felt
and discovered a glass ball. With a petulant expression I flung it into
the street.

Gip said nothing.

For a space neither of us spoke.

"Dada!" said Gip, at last, "that WAS a proper shop!"

I came round with that to the problem of just how the whole thing had
seemed to him. He looked completely undamaged—so far, good; he was
neither scared nor unhinged, he was simply tremendously satisfied with
the afternoon's entertainment, and there in his arms were the four
parcels.

Confound it! what could be in them?

"Um!" I said. "Little boys can't go to shops like that every day."

He received this with his usual stoicism, and for a moment I was sorry I
was his father and not his mother, and so couldn't suddenly there, coram
publico, in our hansom, kiss him. After all, I thought, the thing wasn't
so very bad.

But it was only when we opened the parcels that I really began to be
reassured. Three of them contained boxes of soldiers, quite ordinary
lead soldiers, but of so good a quality as to make Gip altogether forget
that originally these parcels had been Magic Tricks of the only genuine
sort, and the fourth contained a kitten, a little living white kitten,
in excellent health and appetite and temper.

I saw this unpacking with a sort of provisional relief. I hung about in
the nursery for quite an unconscionable time....

That happened six months ago. And now I am beginning to believe it is
all right. The kitten had only the magic natural to all kittens, and
the soldiers seem as steady a company as any colonel could desire. And
Gip—?

The intelligent parent will understand that I have to go cautiously with
Gip.

But I went so far as this one day. I said, "How would you like your
soldiers to come alive, Gip, and march about by themselves?"

"Mine do," said Gip. "I just have to say a word I know before I open the
lid."

"Then they march about alone?"

"Oh, QUITE, dadda. I shouldn't like them if they didn't do that."

I displayed no unbecoming surprise, and since then I have taken occasion
to drop in upon him once or twice, unannounced, when the soldiers were
about, but so far I have never discovered them performing in anything
like a magical manner.

It's so difficult to tell.

There's also a question of finance. I have an incurable habit of paying
bills. I have been up and down Regent Street several times, looking for
that shop. I am inclined to think, indeed, that in that matter honour is
satisfied, and that, since Gip's name and address are known to them, I
may very well leave it to these people, whoever they may be, to send in
their bill in their own time.

Towards mid-day the three pursuers came abruptly round a bend in the
torrent bed upon the sight of a very broad and spacious valley. The
difficult and winding trench of pebbles along which they had tracked
the fugitives for so long, expanded to a broad slope, and with a common
impulse the three men left the trail, and rode to a little eminence set
with olive-dun trees, and there halted, the two others, as became them,
a little behind the man with the silver-studded bridle.

For a space they scanned the great expanse below them with eager eyes.
It spread remoter and remoter, with only a few clusters of sere thorn
bushes here and there, and the dim suggestions of some now waterless
ravine, to break its desolation of yellow grass. Its purple distances
melted at last into the bluish slopes of the further hills—hills it
might be of a greener kind—and above them invisibly supported, and
seeming indeed to hang in the blue, were the snowclad summits of
mountains that grew larger and bolder to the north-westward as the sides
of the valley drew together. And westward the valley opened until a
distant darkness under the sky told where the forests began. But the
three men looked neither east nor west, but only steadfastly across the
valley.

The gaunt man with the scarred lip was the first to speak. "Nowhere," he
said, with a sigh of disappointment in his voice. "But after all, they
had a full day's start."

"They don't know we are after them," said the little man on the white
horse.

"SHE would know," said the leader bitterly, as if speaking to himself.

"Even then they can't go fast. They've got no beast but the mule, and
all to-day the girl's foot has been bleeding—"

The man with the silver bridle flashed a quick intensity of rage on him.
"Do you think I haven't seen that?" he snarled.

"It helps, anyhow," whispered the little man to himself.

The gaunt man with the scarred lip stared impassively. "They can't be
over the valley," he said. "If we ride hard—"

He glanced at the white horse and paused.

"Curse all white horses!" said the man with the silver bridle, and
turned to scan the beast his curse included.

The little man looked down between the melancholy ears of his steed.

"I did my best," he said.

The two others stared again across the valley for a space. The gaunt man
passed the back of his hand across the scarred lip.

"Come up!" said the man who owned the silver bridle, suddenly. The
little man started and jerked his rein, and the horse hoofs of the three
made a multitudinous faint pattering upon the withered grass as they
turned back towards the trail....

They rode cautiously down the long slope before them, and so came
through a waste of prickly, twisted bushes and strange dry shapes of
horny branches that grew amongst the rocks, into the levels below.
And there the trail grew faint, for the soil was scanty, and the only
herbage was this scorched dead straw that lay upon the ground. Still, by
hard scanning, by leaning beside the horses' necks and pausing ever and
again, even these white men could contrive to follow after their prey.

There were trodden places, bent and broken blades of the coarse grass,
and ever and again the sufficient intimation of a footmark. And once
the leader saw a brown smear of blood where the half-caste girl may have
trod. And at that under his breath he cursed her for a fool.

The gaunt man checked his leader's tracking, and the little man on the
white horse rode behind, a man lost in a dream. They rode one after
another, the man with the silver bridle led the way, and they spoke
never a word. After a time it came to the little man on the white horse
that the world was very still. He started out of his dream. Besides the
little noises of their horses and equipment, the whole great valley kept
the brooding quiet of a painted scene.

Before him went his master and his fellow, each intently leaning forward
to the left, each impassively moving with the paces of his horse; their
shadows went before them—still, noiseless, tapering attendants; and
nearer a crouched cool shape was his own. He looked about him. What was
it had gone? Then he remembered the reverberation from the banks of the
gorge and the perpetual accompaniment of shifting, jostling pebbles.
And, moreover—? There was no breeze. That was it! What a vast, still
place it was, a monotonous afternoon slumber. And the sky open and
blank, except for a sombre veil of haze that had gathered in the upper
valley.

He straightened his back, fretted with his bridle, puckered his lips
to whistle, and simply sighed. He turned in his saddle for a time, and
stared at the throat of the mountain gorge out of which they had come.
Blank! Blank slopes on either side, with never a sign of a decent beast
or tree—much less a man. What a land it was! What a wilderness! He
dropped again into his former pose.

It filled him with a momentary pleasure to see a wry stick of purple
black flash out into the form of a snake, and vanish amidst the brown.
After all, the infernal valley WAS alive. And then, to rejoice him still
more, came a little breath across his face, a whisper that came and
went, the faintest inclination of a stiff black-antlered bush upon a
little crest, the first intimations of a possible breeze. Idly he wetted
his finger, and held it up.

He pulled up sharply to avoid a collision with the gaunt man, who had
stopped at fault upon the trail. Just at that guilty moment he caught
his master's eye looking towards him.

For a time he forced an interest in the tracking. Then, as they rode on
again, he studied his master's shadow and hat and shoulder, appearing
and disappearing behind the gaunt man's nearer contours. They had ridden
four days out of the very limits of the world into this desolate place,
short of water, with nothing but a strip of dried meat under their
saddles, over rocks and mountains, where surely none but these fugitives
had ever been before—for THAT!

And all this was for a girl, a mere wilful child! And the man had whole
cityfuls of people to do his basest bidding—girls, women! Why in the
name of passionate folly THIS one in particular? asked the little man,
and scowled at the world, and licked his parched lips with a blackened
tongue. It was the way of the master, and that was all he knew. Just
because she sought to evade him....

His eye caught a whole row of high plumed canes bending in unison, and
then the tails of silk that hung before his neck flapped and fell. The
breeze was growing stronger. Somehow it took the stiff stillness out of
things—and that was well.